Snow Day…

Seriously?

I was thinking a blizzard was a good excuse to not write a blog post this morning. I had bigger fish to fry. There was a wall of snow behind my car where the latenight plow cleaned my parking lot and I had to do a sort of highland jig: stamping and kicking to break up the impenetrable frozen slush. Then I used my new window scraper to unload a few hundred pounds of white cement from the roof, hood and trunk…

Because I am someone who enjoys instant gratification (and because I wanted to see if I was stuck) I gunned the motor over the remains of the plow-leavings backwards, with all the windows iced up like a mobile igloo, and blindly (squinting through ice) putted out of the parking lot and into the alley that runs beside the church. There was only one other car on the road and of course that person turned down the alley and drove at me in a daring game of ice-chicken until I backed up (blindly).

But I made it to the office: a place that looks decidedly Dickensian in the grey light of a snowy morning.

All it needs is a line of children with soup bowls piteously singing for “More!”

I know it snows. I am sure I am not the only person who has ever had to remove snow from a car. And I am sure I am not the only recovering alcoholic in a cold climate today. It just feels like I am. So I decided to write a post, even on a snow day, because bad weather can be a relapse trigger…

I am reminded of the time I was riding in a gondola with a vodka swilling boatman in St. Petersburg (Russia not Florida). It was during their “white nights” and it was light at 3 in the morning, with people dancing in the streets and all the stores and restaurants and bars open all night long. The captain said, as he tipped the bottle inside the brown paper bag, “This is the time of year we are happy! We dance and sing and make babies in the white nights!”

I asked, “What about the ‘dark days’? I assume you have the ‘dark days’?”

“Of course,” he said, “The dark days are terrible! That is when the Russians cry and write poetry and kill themselves…”

Nothing as drastic as that my friends. Nothing as drastic as that. In fact the sun came out and it’s a beautiful day.