Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Snow Day

With all this snowy weather on the news (but not here where I live where it was 80 something again today), I have been pondering snow memories today.  It started because my father wrote something on Facebook about having not been exposed to most of the sports we see on the Winter Olympics, coming from NYC.  He was making up new sports like ice scraping off windshields and climbing up icy steps with no banister.  That got me thinking of my best and strangest snow stories.
First of all, it is a well-known fact that NYC never closes their schools for snow, even if every suburb does.  If you are a school employee (as my father, sister and I were) you go.  Slip sliding to work....come on, you're from the city, you can take it!  As kids, my mom always sent us to school, no matter how much snow there was.  That usually meant spending the day either combining with the other class from our grade or, if it was really bad, the whole school watching old, bad cartoons in the auditorium, all freaking day.  Whatever, I guess, it builds character, or teaches work ethic, or my sister and I, and all the others there were just that annoying (can't be).
Best memories though were the days, where I guess it really was canceled.  What was more exciting than hearing it was supposed to snow, going to sleep and waking up the next morning, running to the window to see SNOW (YES!!!!)? Or what can be worse than, false alarm, no snow or just a dusting (BOOOO)?  The biggest snow I can remember was in the early 80's.  There was a few feet of snow but also it was windy so the drifts were really deep.  We couldn't get our front door open because the snow was blocking it so eventually my parents opened the kitchen window and threw me out.  WEEEEE.  I momentarily was completely captivated and just started playing but then I was reminded I was supposed to be freeing the rest of the family members.  I dug the way so they could open the door and then WOOOSH, just jumped all over the place. It was a good snow, soft and awesome!!!  I jumped around and would stop to dig to try to figure out where I was.  At one point I hit something hard.  It turned out to be the top of our station wagon! Not the hood, the actually top!  So these drifts much have been at least 5 feet.  When I got to the backyard, the garage door was covered to the top in snow.  SNOW!!!!
Fast forward to the 90's.  Home from college, there was a blizzard.  State of Emergency was declared, so only emergency vehicles were supposed to be on the roads.  Well, this seems like the perfect time to find out if the Chinese food place was open.  Why would it be open?  No one was supposed to be out. Well, apparently Chinese food chefs are considered emergency workers because they were there!  Not delivering for some reason (reason being they didn't want to kill themselves delivering Chinese food).  So, my sister and I did the only sensible thing that could be done in such a situation;  placed a pick up order and then walked there in the knee deep snow to get it.  You know, knee deep as in you have to pick your leg up over the snow every single step in order to move.  Totally sensible.  We are serious about Chinese food.  SERIOUS!
I miss the snow!!!!  These were some of my best memories.  I honored them today by ordering Chinese food.  It may be 80 degrees out but some things never change.