I never took the time to buy a snow blower or have sons, so when a nor'easter batters Long Island's North Shore, I have to slip a bottle of low-dose aspirin into the pocket of my parka and head outside chanting, "lift with the knees, lift with the knees."
Funny how he only worried about the neighbor kid.I try to use the time creatively, pondering, for example, what exactly it is that Tom Suozzi does for Cablevision, or thinking up ways to pay down the federal debt.Eventually, Dad installed heating wires that helped with the roof melting, although they created giant icicles that stretched from the eaves all the way to the ground, giving the house a kind of Carlsbad Cavern look that lasted until early spring.I'm calling Washington as soon as I finish the driveway.One of our neighbors was so far off the road he had to sign up for 17 phones, and when a call came in you couldn't tell if you were at a fire muster or a Lon Cheney movie.We used to get real snow back then, none of this modern-day, pretty-boy, by-the-inch business, but feet of it, overnight.(My favorite, roughly translated, means, "May the Black Plague crawl up your rectum.")After a really big storm, Dad would obsess for a day or two about the roof caving in, then finally climb up there to push the snow off, each shovelful punctuated with a grunt and a Ukrainian expletive so foul my mother would make the kids stay in the house even though none of us spoke the language.With insulated underwear, a sweater, coat, ski pants, scarf, hat, extra socks and buckle-up boots, getting dressed to shovel was almost as tiring as the actual snow removal.It would get so cold that men were allowed to wear their socks to bed. We'd have winters so bad you'd occasionally see a chicken with a capon.My brother and I would get rousted early, while it was still dark, so we'd have time to dig out my father's truck and uncover the mailbox before grabbing a little breakfast and heading off to school.I could never really tell who chose which.Today, they cancel school if the News 12 meteorologist has a cough.Recent idea: a national lottery in which the winner doesn't get cash but is exempted from ever paying income tax again.School, by the way, was canceled for snow exactly twice in the 12 years I attended up there, and I think one of them was actually a federal holiday.This allowed him to obsess about the icicles crashing through a window or killing the neighbor kid.I'm good at shoveling snow, having grown up in New Hampshire before global warming, back in the days when the White Mountains deserved their name and winter temperatures reached depths that would flash-freeze whatever was in your nostrils the second you stepped outside.You wouldn't think you could develop a sweat at 25-below, but you can. Just not in the nostrils.That's right: We actually had to shovel uphill, both ways.Long driveways were a boon for the telephone company when I was a boy, because Ma Bell would only give you 100 feet of line from the pole to the house for every handset you agreed to take.Believe it or not, they actually had roads in New Hampshire back then, but nobody liked to live very close to them. Instead, most residents had long, winding driveways that took you in a couple of acres, past your yellow pines, your rusting pickups and the odd chunk of granite. Part of it was privacy, part of it making sure you had enough room to "live free or die," as the state motto goes.Our driveway wasn't as long as that, but it was horseshoe shaped and, since the house was built on a knoll, sloped in two directions.And wait for the plow to come back.It's not the cold and back-breaking work that bothers me most about shoveling snow, but the boredom of it all, the mindless pushing, lifting and flipping, performed over and over again until you finally reach the plow pile at the end of the driveway and hack through the crust and ice boulders and, at long last, get to head inside for Advil and brandy.
I'm calling Washington as soon as I finish the driveway.
