by Robert Falcione

Monday, February 9, 2015

After  working from home this morning and then snow-blowing for what seemed like forever — by the time I got halfway done, the cleared part needed to be cleared again — I stopped at the Spoon for a light lunch. On the way there, I wondered how a photo of Pout Rock would look from the causeway, catching the storm with Sandy Island Beach in the background. But the background was pure white, which is quickly becoming the color of evil.

         Turning into the driveway of the Spoon and being surrounded by the enormous piles of snow, both there and at 77 West Main, I realized that plowing snow was not as easy as it used to be. It wasn't like the old days when a plow driver brought a six pack along and did rote maneuvers on a familiar, uncluttered  route. Clutter got punished in the olden days.

        "Want to see me bury that car?" asked Kevin, with whom I was riding while he cleared an MBTA parking lot in Needham around 1967. It was really a rhetorical question, not a request for permission. His unhappy boss reached him by radio 30 minutes later, after seeing his handiwork.

        Then there was the time that the plow driver at my sister's apartment complex in Framingham failed to look at the alternative location for the resident parking sticker and totally buried her vehicle, a just deserve for the interloper that he thought she was. He quickly unburied it. Yikes! His name was Kevin, too!

         After I passed the causeway, I wondered if this unrelenting snowy weather was the beginning of a new glacial period. It snows, it thaws a little, it freezes again and expands. It snows again, and  then again, and then again, and soon there are several feet of snow, then tens of feet of snow and then hundreds of feet of snow compressing and freezing everything below, while the entire mass moves slowly toward Woonsocket.

         Will we have to build homes that will sort of float on top of a glacier, like an igloo or a rubber raft? What about the cable and the internet, which every igloo will need? They will all need to be wireless. But we'll still need electricity in our igloos. How is that going to work? Wow, glaciers can be complicated.

         As I looked at the piles of snow at the Spoon, I realized that the plow drivers were acquiring a new set of skills out of necessity. I look at those piles in awe of their creativity. No six packs in those machines. And when the people from the future dig down deep and find those now-fossilized pyramids, they too will wonder in awe at how they were built.

MORE...

         I ran into the Spoon to get a better seat than the woman racing me from her car. But we both got in at the same time and had a conversation about cats — why she hates them and why I view them as useful.

         My mother hated cats, and so for many years of my life I, too, hated those "sneaky, filthy things." I never got the woman's name, and so I will make one up now. Mary.

         I told Mary about having had a mouse problem at my former home by the lake, and how horrifying those sneaky, filthy creatures are.

        One day while watching television, I heard a mouse trap snap, and decided that the sneaky, filthy thing would be just as dead by the time of the next commercial;  but by the time I got to it, another mouse, or several,  had eaten the top of its skull as well as its brain.

        "That's really against the rules — mouse cannibalism," I said to Mary in an understated,  Bill Murray sort of way.

         "Yes," Mary said, laughing, and adding to the farce, "Rule number one!". But I couldn't agree.

         "Actually," I said, "Rule  Number One is, 'No smoking crack cocaine in the front office area'."  We both laughed and I realized there was an irony involved in this, much like the fact that everyone who plowed cars under was named Kevin.

          I had discovered that at some  point prior to the cannibalism, the sneaky, filthy things had climbed into a drawer and eaten some of my Sucrets, a pleasing and numbing throat lozenge designed to abate coughs in human beings. In those olden days, one of the ingredients was something like Benzedrine, which was sold in higher doses as a pep pill. It was commonly known as speed. Much like their human counterparts would in later years, the mouse-dose caused some sort of crazy behavior, the type of behavior exhibited in the movie Reefer Madness; except for the cannibalism.

         I told Mary about my adopted cat. No, I didn't rescue it. I stole its affection from a neighbor by doing something they did not. I fed it. And in return, as part of an unspoken agreement, he shows me all of the mice and chipmunks he catches, mice and chipmunks that he keeps from entering my living space. A second agreement is that he will not scratch me to the point of drawing blood, and I will not drop-kick him like a football.

          The fact that Tigger jumps up and onto things on command, like a circus lion, amazed Mary. I also told her how Tigger, at the front door, upon hearing, "Go around  back," will walk all the way around the other three units in the condo complex, down the driveway and to my back door at the middle of the building. Tigger has not been seen for three days [Insert sad-face emoticon here].

          Mary said her goodbyes and made her way to her next destination. I finished my fish sandwich and went to the studio at 24 Main Street, the one where smoking crack cocaine in the front office area is not allowed. I worked for a while, and then sought a coffee Downtown.

          Colella's Red Barn closed early; something about the barista not being able to get there. Come on, my mother could have gotten there, hating cats along the way.

          Hopkinton Gourmet was closed. Bittersweet was closed, and Bill's Pizza was closed. I thought of the bank, but they looked closed. They have free coffee for people who bank there, and I suppose anyone who walks in, much like a salad bar I saw  at a restaurant in the middle of Vermont. In retrospect, it is probably for people waiting to speak with a representative. That's okay, I call it interest. I wondered what would happen if the coffee went away as a result of the glacier.

          In the morning, the  television reporter said everyone was out and about, and if by "everyone" he meant people with plows on the front of their vehicles, he was right, because that is all I saw on the way in, and all through the day. No passenger vehicles were on the roads.

           In the evening, the governor declared a state of emergency and a travel ban.

          He never mentioned the glacier. I was wondering if they were keeping it secret, much like I hoped they would if a life-ending comet were hurtling toward Earth.

 

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

          The governor called a state of emergency and a vehicle ban the night before, and so I refused a few requests for my presence, but nonetheless, took the extraordinary risk of driving my vehicle to the office and finding out, in case I got stopped, if my job description as a reporter/Editor was an essential service. On my way I noticed that thousands of other drivers were also taking the same risk. I wondered if the human race, as some sort of monolithic entity, coalesced back into a primordial ooze and decided en masse to ignore the governor's order.

           While returning home for a brief time in the afternoon, I  discovered that Tigger was indeed okay and alive. He couldn't have eaten any more or any faster had he been a wolf [Insert extremely happy-face emoticon here].

            Did a portrait of a beautiful woman early in the afternoon, and did HopNews stuff the rest of the day, leaving for home in the evening while the Fire Department was scouring the Downtown for the source of an overwhelming odor of gas. I wondered if it had anything to do  with the three billion cubic feet of liquefied natural gas being stored and distributed on Wilson Street. I wondered if they would survive the glacier.

 

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

             It is always a good thing to do an introspection, and so, this morning, I reread and rewrote the journal entries from the previous two days. The rewrite was not for content, but for grammar and clarity.

             It appears I may have been wrong about conflating the recent back to back storms into the idea of a glacier, or a new glacial period. The coffee is back and the snow has stopped. The snow that fell is still causing problems, but let's hope that we'll soon have floods, gnats and mosquitos to complain about, instead of snow and ice dams.

             So, in the meantime, I am chalking it up to a case of cabin fever, and thinking about all that I learned during my fever:

             Everyone can drive during a state of emergency.

              The coffee will come back.

             Tigger will survive any weather he is challenged by. 

             There is likely, on a short term basis, not a comet hurtling toward Earth.

              Mice get crazy on amphetamines.

              This might not be a new glacial period. 

              Kevin is the name of the plow driver who buried your car.