Up at 7:20. Clock flashing 2:35. We lost power, my powers of deductive reasoning tell me. We regained power, ditto the deduction, kiddo. Yippee. Out bedroom window. Wow, it’s weally white out there, wifey. Wifey: “Yes, I know, you wuss, where were YOU at 6:00a when you shoulda been shoveling snow instead of shoveling the shoot last night at your computer doing whatever it is you do on that dagnabit demonic device.” (Disclosure: All previous dialogue is purely figment of my imagination. Never said. Never happened. But this is a blog, which means half of what is writ is true. Like the famous advertising axiom, you just don’t know which half, unless the blogger tells you, and even then, who knows? As for anonymous bloggers, that creepy crawly species of digital devolution, you can’t believe anything those gutless wonders write. They blog for therapy when they should be IN therapy, but I can’t help them there because I’m not a licensed practitioner.) How’s THAT for a protracted parenthetical aside? Send your answers to bapar@ncnlocal.com if you don’t want to win a prize because I got nuttin’ to give.
Like the little kid I never stopped being, the profusion of snow excites me. I can’t wait to get outside and get to the office. I’m assuming there will be few of us there, mainly those like myself who live within a coupla miles, within the Yorktown town limits.
It may sound flakey, but even though on days like this a person can feel adrift, I have ice in my veins, and perhaps water on the brain. But I say, bring on the snow, man.
Open the garage door. There’s a curvature of snow rising up to where the door just was before retracting on its creaky pulley contraption. I pick up a shovel to push some of the snow away from the portal, all the while thinking this may not be the best idea because my back has been bothering me since bowling those three games Sunday night with my YAC brethren in support of Yorktown High baseball coach Sean Kennedy’s fundraiser for the team. Let’s just say after a long layoff, I found bowling currently is not right up my alley, and it didn’t help that my back was infirm before the ball got rolling (which explains why my game from the get-go was in the gutter until I found my graceless form).
I pulled my 1998 RAV 4 ragtop out and immediately had the sensation of hydroplaning, except on frozen instead of liquid water. It was kinda fun, actually.
At the end of our hammerhead driveway, the car stopped as the wheels kept spinning. I couple of jukes back and forth let me burst through the street-plowed embankment forming a barricade between the publicly-owned street and our bank-owned paved path destined to end in a garage.
I picked up the yellow plastic bag containing the 20th Century artifact that still arrives daily and brought it inside like the once-in-a-while thoughtful husband I oughta be more often-in-a-while. The wife peered outside the warmth of the kitchen and what passes for a virtual mud foyer and declared after eyeballing the snow by the garage entrance that it looked like 18 inches. After I regained my composure from being doubled over laughing at the hyperbolic assessment, I said it was a drift, not fallen snow, and that it probably was less than a foot deep at that.
Elyse produced one of those math-class three-sided rulers with markings on two sides I didn’t understand in trig and still don’t, and sure enough, the snow stopped at about 10 inches. Case closed.
It was now about 8:35 as I proceeded to the office, snapping white-out vignettes with my phone along the way (Verizon can’t offer the iPhone soon enough for my money, and it will take a lot of that for me to change my fruit diet, but I like apples more than blackberries anyhoo.)
The only vehicles I espied between my house and where Route 35 meets Broad Street right past Brookside Elementary were snow plows and that of my neighbor, Yorktown Board of Ed trustee Mark Drexel, who rolled down his window while making the turn from town to Broad as I sat at the Stop sign to ask what I was doing on the road in these conditions. Me: “I’m crazy.” Mark: “Me too.”
Oh, yeah, and there was one other private vehicle, driven by someone who, in this of all conditions, didn’t have his headlights on. He’s of course our Maddening Motorist Award winner of the day, and one only can hope the dunderhead doesn’t cause damage to someone else who knows enough that it’s both common sense and state law to have headlights on in inclement weather so other motorists can more easily see you coming. I barely saw him barreling down Broad Street as I waited to exit our development. Nice going, Slick.
Then, at the intersection of Ridge Street and Route 202, a power line was down, hovering not far above the roof of my car, with Yorktown Police Officer Mike Kahn on the scene. I continued snapping away (photos will be posted at Facebook.com/NCNLocal).
In the middle of town, I could continue to count other cars on one hand. Pulled into Starbucks closed. Edwin’s open. 7-Eleven open. Those business operators should get some kind of prize for customer service beyond the call of duty. Let’s hear it, folks, for neighborhood owned-and-operated businesses. Last time there was a lot less snow falling one afternoon, Panera closed its doors at 4:00 p.m. What’s with these chain operations? Hardly hardy stock. Guess which businesses I’ll be sure to patronize more in the future? The ones who are there when you need them most, that’s who. Local businesses, that’s who.
This is the kind of weather and these are the kinds of times that cause some of us to fret for the future of civilization. Believe it or not, that’s not meant to be either facetious or an exaggeration. A day like Friday, Feb. 26 separates those in the snow from those who don’t want to know what it takes to get the job done.
What does one make of workers who arrive at their Yorktown office at 7:30 a.m. from an hour’s drive away in a different state — none the worse for wear — or who determinedly push ahead from Poughkeepsie to report to work. Or a worker whose husband is shoveling the snowplow-created wall of snow blocking the cul-de-sac driveway so she can get to work on time? These are folks made of sterner stuff when the white stuff causes others to act like the sky is falling.
For an employer, a day like today is a no-win. You can’t exactly expect people to push ahead to get to work under such conditions, but the truth of the matter is I am no mountain man and am far from fearless and not exactly wreckless when it comes to my personal safety and well-being, and I don’t see that this is exactly a record-making meteorological event. The main roads are very passable if you drive with due caution at sensible speeds.
My friend Ahmad Bash, owner of Yorktown’s 7-Eleven, told me this morning that a customer told him, “This is the worst I’ve seen.” Both Ahmad and I concurred it’s far, far from that. “He hasn’t seen much then,” I cracked. Ahmad recalled the storm of 1996 that was appreciably more precipitous than this occurrence. This is no walk in the park, but it’s also not a walk through Central Park at night in the 1970s and ’80s, which in that era was downright foolhardy, if not death-defying. Maybe it still is, but Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg have done yeomans’ work reducing NYC crime in general, so hats off to them both. The only folks who still think NYC is the nation’s crime capital are those who never visited it but hate it nonetheless. I’ve encountered the type in my Left Coast travels especially, like the time one wit advised a friend not to go near Yankee Stadium because it’s in … The South Bronx! (ominous melodramatic music swells here). Of course, the immediate periphery of The Stadium is eminently safe because it has more cops patrolling than a precinct stationhouse.
Weather like this also tests the resourcefulness and sheer competency of TV news. One field reporter described a town where power had gone off and on and off again, labeling that chronic problem “concurrent,” which was as close to “recurring” as he could manage but made no sense. Something tells me he’s not into crossword puzzles. Comic books, maybe. It’s no joke, though. These are professional, very well-paid public presenters and information agents who struggle to speak with authority or lucidity. And you thought Ted Knight’s character on The Mary Tyler Moore Show or William Hurt’s airhead anchor in “Broadcast News” were pure fiction?
When the going gets tough out there, the tough in general don’t seem to be producing TV news coverage, which quickly begins to play like the movie “Groundhog Day.” Every “package,” as those who make TV call it, is a cookie-cutter version of the one before it and after it. How many B rolls of snow plows and salt trucks do we need to see, or motorists whining, or a reporter standing waist-deep in a snowdrift. We get it. It snowed. A lot. Thanks for the incisive reportage.
My opthalmologist’s office is closed today, so my experiment in wearing contacts for the first time in my life will have to wait. When I called a second time to see if anybody would be in the office today, the message service operator told me, “The roads are awful, sir.” Oh, I see (but not with contacts until next week, I guess.)
Well, tell that to a hospital patient who needs a nurse or doctor or orderly, or to someone in the ER waiting for a serious injury to be treated: “We’re sorry, but nobody can help you today because, you know, the roads out there are just awful.” Tell it to the people of Haiti: “We just had 12 inches of snow and you can’t imagine what it’s like. We are completely dysfunctional.” You can say that again. Haitians only wish they could imagine something so relatively uneventful.
Hudson Valley Hospital Center spokesperson Dawn French tells us that “[we] had a couple of dozen staff members stay overnight, some sleeping on inflatable mattresses…to ensure we continue to provide quality care for our patients. The Engineering Department has worked through the night plowing the hospital to keep it safe for visitors and staff…”
THAT’S WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT!
Despite the edgy observations this blog is known to make as a matter of course — that’s commentainment! — I don’t sit in judgment or hold to account or blame anyone for not going to work today (and if you care what I think anyhow, that’s your first mistake; I’m just another jerk with an opinion on everything that doesn’t concern me.)
What can rankle, though, is the attitude of anyone who virtually decides not to go to work the next day based on the eventuality of a forecast — not on the workday’s actuality. It’s not my opinion that matters in that case. It’s just wrong. Maybe it’s time to change jobs for that person, or for the job to be changed for that person. In the case of Friday, Feb. 25, the forecast was prescient and a decision to stay home is well advised. But at other times, when the forecast overstates the actuality, it’s not the weather’s severity that decides who shows up; it’s whether the person’s free will wants to be at work that day.
Now I’m in Chase Media Group offices at my desk. Oops. We lost power. But there’s backup. So, heigh-ho, it’s back to work I go. Where there’s free will, there’s a freeway that’ll take you there. Unless there’s a little (less) snow in the way (than today). Then, where there’s a wimp, there’s no way I’m going in to work on a so-so snowday because I’d rather play than make hay. O-kay! Whatever you say!
Stay safe, warm, dry. And don’t patronize anonymous blogs. If you’re going to get riled up, like by today’s especially bilious blog entry you just read, might as well know who to rant against.
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