The warm weather is returning to New York and I am not as excited about it as I once would have been. Maybe this is because last May, during a walk up Fifth Avenue, I was treated to the sight of a naked man strolling casually down the street enjoying the sunshine. Mercifully, he had strapped a mask to himself where Adam’s fig leaf would have been, and he did have on socks and shoes. He wasn’t altogether crazy.

As the temperatures rise in Manhattan, unhinged people whose behavior has been impeded by the winter winds will again be pouring back into the streets this year. Those of us who got used to walking to dinner without being yelled at by the mentally ill or flashed by those who find clothing too restrictive have to prepare ourselves for the consequences of sunny skies and 70 degrees.

Just a few weeks prior to my naked man sighting, a friend showed me a photo she had taken of an entirely naked woman walking around in the middle of the afternoon at East 57^th Street and Third Avenue — no fig leaves this time. She said a police officer approached to kindly ask if the woman needed help. “No, thanks,” was her nonchalant reply, as though she had been offered cheese at an art gallery opening. 

I am starting to feel like Haley Joel Osment in “The Sixth Sense,” whose character famously tells his psychiatrist: “I see dead people.” He was frightened at the sight of them, but the ghosts around him couldn’t understand what he was all worked up about. As for me, I see naked people. I think it’s strange, but they stroll around oblivious to my shock, enjoying the balmy weather. Worse still is that other people see them as well but are too busy looking down at their phones to have any discernible reaction.

I am starting to wonder who is crazy. Is it the person who knew to put on his shoes but not his underwear before walking outside, or is it those who see naked people roaming our streets, shrug, and persist in paying good money to live like this? Indecent-exposure laws are still on the books, but one gets the sense that the word “indecent” has little meaning in a city where shooting up heroin on the median at Broadway and West 81^st Street is a new normal. 

If public decorum is dead, then the remaining question is: How many naked people do I have to see in Midtown before I leave for a leafy suburb? Should I count the half-naked homeless man I saw sitting on a park bench with his pants around his knees back in September? He at least wore clothes, even if he couldn’t manage to keep them on. How many is too many? Is that number divided by two for my 15-year-old daughter? 

I get the sense from friends who lived here through the 1970s that I am supposed to add these naked sightings to the long list of things I proudly overlook because I am “New York Tough.” It’s a badge of courage to be the kind of woman who can live amongst crime, drug use, filth, and potholes. The occasional naked person is just one more thing to swerve around on the sidewalk and laugh about over dinner.

Or is it? If it keeps going this way I fear I will, like so many of my fellow New Yorkers, lose my ability to feel shocked altogether. Maybe that is the only way to live in Manhattan these days, but I am reminded by my friends who left this past year that it isn’t the only way to live.