A winter’s day Jan. 17, 2024
The snow came long enough to deposit its mess on the streets
and sidewalks before fading away to rain, rain then turning to ice as night
came.
I had to drive up to the school to drop off and pick up my
wife because the landscape was too treacherous to tackle even for the short
five block walk there and back.
She falls on dry surfaces and much more often when the
ground is slick.
In these towns, the streets are so narrow traveling them –
especially after inclement weather – is like perpetually reliving the trench scene
from Star Wars, parked cars filling both sides of even the one-way streets,
leaving this narrow gap between them to travel by.
The cold tends to bring silence to our part of the world as
people hunker down in warm apartments rather than taking to the streets. So,
this makes the trip even for these few blocks somewhat eerie, as if humanity
has ceased to exist, but all that we have built and all that operates to bring
us comfort remain, lighted stores, flashing traffic lights, the occasional blur
of a TV in some second floor apartment building.
I kept the radio off and drove through that silence as if some
kind of ritual, the spirits hovering over me as I traveled, protecting me from
ill omens.
The snow fall was too limited for most people to shovel, and
for the most part people simply spread salt, although because of how the
precipitation occurred, even the city’s salting the roads had only a marginal
effect, ice everywhere except where the rubber met the road.
Forecasters put off the storm they originally anticipated
for Thursday until Friday, but are being very unpredictable in their
predictions, as if they are scared to say too much, fearing the storm might not
occur or perhaps will amount to something worse than their forecasts tell us.
While it is sunlight this morning, the temperatures are
barely out of the teens, leaving much of the ice from yesterday where it lay,
except what the sun might evaporate or melt, which by nightfall means slicker,
blacker ice to be wary of.
I have several things to cover in Bayonne. But I’ll be
traveling there by train, which means I’ll have to dress as if a trip to the Antarctica
– something the train platforms with their gusts of wind often resemble. Some years,
I’ve actually taken the train in the opposite direction of my intended destination
just to keep warm, as I expect I will likely have to do tonight when the second
of the events I need to cover concludes.
With weather more like weather should be this time of year,
the newscasters need something else to rant and rave about, and the ongoing
presidential election largely gives them that, complaining about how Trump won
Iowa headed into New Hampshire.
Good news is not in the forecast for the foreseeable future
and so, I do my best to tune that part of the broadcast out or hum some old pop
tune in my head to drown out the monotony media provides, forcing people to
digest an unending flood of hate, then reporting on how hateful people have
become.
The old joke about hell freezing over comes to mind,
although if Dante is to be believe, the heart of hell is frigid not blistering.
I have yet to make the holiday trip to Scranton, even though
the holiday is long over. Part of this is because of the ongoing cold I’ve had.
Another part is the fact that my car was acting up, first a slow leak in the
tires that kept me from chancing the road, and then later, something more
serious that might have struck me had I taken the trip, a perpetually stalling
car that would have left me stranded along the highway somewhere or perhaps
stuck in Scranton seeking someone to fix it as a greater expense than I
ultimately paid at my regular repair place in Jersey City.
Even when not plagued with illness or disrepair, I don’t
like the winter trip which takes me along the ridge of the Poconos, leaving me
vulnerable to the more serious winter storms (I nearly used the term extreme
weather, but since that is a code word for the phony science behind climate
change, I’ll avoid the term and stick to more conventional language, trying to
remind people this is winter and it gets cold in winter, and sometimes it even
snows.)
At the end of the day, spring follows winter, summer spring,
and fall after summer in a cycle that even my old professor Mollenkott would
acknowledge as the normal pattern of life. We need to stop listening to media
telling us what the world is like and stick our heads outside once in a while
to see for ourselves.
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