THE LONG AGO THEN
Snow comes equipped with its own form of quiet.
It’s a different kind of quiet than everyday quiet.
It’s like the hushed, hold your breath silence that descends in-between movements when the string quartet is temporarily still and resonant.
Leaves rustle, like brothers wrestling in their bedroom as snow makes the air thick and pungent which mutes the tumbling sonic waves of nature until all you hear is the distant bleating of herd of traffic ice-grazing somewhere out in the grown up distance. Then, suddenly, the wind makes a grand diva entrance and all the elements stand on point, as if suddenly amazed, and twirl like Graham mad in the throes of Clymenastra. This shakes the colors of autumn right out the picture like a giant etch-a-sketch, leaving the trees as haunted and bare as war prisoners left to die in the dead of winter. It reminds you how final the battles of every day are.
Sitting on a winter couch, daydream-staring out my picture window is like watching a documentary on winter in fast forward motion. Fall falls like a just burst parachute, but winter arrives with a startling gong-bang. We are suddenly invaded by stormtroopers and our only defense are multi-layers of head to toe wool and giant puffer coats that make us look like a civilization of steamer trunks en route to the staterooms of the Titanic. Inside, music sounds crisper and more alert than usual. Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven all feel immediate, responsive and resurrected. We augment the orchestration with crackling fireplaces, popping popcorn and whistling kettles and the low murmur of a weary TV set which, after a while, slowly becomes the equivalent of a repetitive roommate who doesn’t know when to shut up. And yet we listen endlessly and attentively to the never changing news and weather reports like we’re receiving vital life-changing transmissions from the front. Because the weather is a giant, living beast, I find myself less lonely and isolated than I do during other seasons, which always make me want to escape the premises. It’s nice knowing that you don’t have to be someplace. Or even better, that you don’t want to be someplace. Winter roots you and it playfully spars with you. It punches you and you punch back for a few rounds. When I was little, winter felt like the arrival of a Mary Poppins. A child’s magical best friend, who performed grand wind tricks and turned our world into a giant snow globe. The windows would steam up like mommy’s tears and I would draw pictures with my fingertips or if there were enough panes, I could play a game of quickly dissolving tic-tac-toe. Lawn-splayed, frozen bicycle corpses lay like fallen battlefield soldiers and snow-covered cars no longer purposeful, looked like they were on a slow, bumper to bumper death march towards a wintery Bataan. Life had thrown a literal wet blanket over everything, and in those moments, I felt as small as I could possibly be like I was permanently memorialized in a still life photo which would not show any signs of movement for three or four months. From my window perch, I could see plumes of smoke escaping like a Lucky Strike exhale from nearby factories and I could hear the rumble of the block-away Long Island Railroad trains as they huffed and puffed like mountain climbers, depositing life-weary road warriors back to their safe houses. People came inside, shook off the snow like canines, stomped their boots like River dancers, and ripped off their coats like Clark Kent peeling off his secret identity business shirt, ready to take flight into the world of warmth. Cheeks were as red as cherries, noses ran like evacuees, and there was a lot of mad hopping around to get the blood running, like engine oil. Radiators clanked like tribal drums and the ritual of being a reformed family began. Like music, dinner served a greater purpose too. All that heat and rising steam made it feel like we were suddenly heading into the tropics. When I was little virtually every meal involved some kind of Campbell’s soup and it did not matter that virtually everything that we ate involved some kind of starch or massive amounts of sugar. We ate as slovenly and as fast as Vikings, with little decorum or etiquette. We loved our slop. Our feed. Our chow. Our bread, our canned corn and our straight from the German bakery desserts. Later dad would cook chestnuts on an open fire, presiding over the stove like a circus vendor. Constant snacking was another winter ritual. It was like we were getting ready for hibernation and had to fortify ourselves with massive amounts of Hostess cakes, Chips Ahoy and Tasty-cakes. We didn’t just fall asleep. By 8 o’clock, long after we had marinated in bubble tubs and been windblown by early, filament smelling hair dryers and watched enough TV to make anyone mute and mindless, we would literally lapse into a coma en route to our twin beds. The walls were cold, but since Dr. Denton had made his house call, we were toasty. The radiators would keep up their calypso beat as our tucked beneath our pillow transistor radios softly sent rock and roll songs and frantic commercials directly to our heads And yet, the winter quiet was always there. It was a counterbalance in equal proportions to the covered cage parakeet chirping, pipe clanging, grown-up TV laugh track and mommy dish rattling, that as you started to fade away, all seemed to drift away like an ocean tide, defying gravity by never returning to shore. We would dream what we lived, because in many ways it was all a dream, even more so now, as I sit here, dressed from head to toe in middle age, listening to my earbuds, feet up hoisted up on a centuries-old pine coffee table, wearing slippers and sweats, where I find myself thinking about the long ago then, which carries me in the arms of memory to visions of my parents, who are now out there somewhere, doing what they did for years of nights, lying side by side, buried in their bed, sleeping beneath blankets of white, protected by the whim of the elements, in a hard-earned, and eternal rest waiting, I think, for me to say goodnight to them.
Leaves rustle, like brothers wrestling in their bedroom as snow makes the air thick and pungent which mutes the tumbling sonic waves of nature until all you hear is the distant bleating of herd of traffic ice-grazing somewhere out in the grown up distance. Then, suddenly, the wind makes a grand diva entrance and all the elements stand on point, as if suddenly amazed, and twirl like Graham mad in the throes of Clymenastra. This shakes the colors of autumn right out the picture like a giant etch-a-sketch, leaving the trees as haunted and bare as war prisoners left to die in the dead of winter. It reminds you how final the battles of every day are.
Sitting on a winter couch, daydream-staring out my picture window is like watching a documentary on winter in fast forward motion. Fall falls like a just burst parachute, but winter arrives with a startling gong-bang. We are suddenly invaded by stormtroopers and our only defense are multi-layers of head to toe wool and giant puffer coats that make us look like a civilization of steamer trunks en route to the staterooms of the Titanic. Inside, music sounds crisper and more alert than usual. Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven all feel immediate, responsive and resurrected. We augment the orchestration with crackling fireplaces, popping popcorn and whistling kettles and the low murmur of a weary TV set which, after a while, slowly becomes the equivalent of a repetitive roommate who doesn’t know when to shut up. And yet we listen endlessly and attentively to the never changing news and weather reports like we’re receiving vital life-changing transmissions from the front. Because the weather is a giant, living beast, I find myself less lonely and isolated than I do during other seasons, which always make me want to escape the premises. It’s nice knowing that you don’t have to be someplace. Or even better, that you don’t want to be someplace. Winter roots you and it playfully spars with you. It punches you and you punch back for a few rounds. When I was little, winter felt like the arrival of a Mary Poppins. A child’s magical best friend, who performed grand wind tricks and turned our world into a giant snow globe. The windows would steam up like mommy’s tears and I would draw pictures with my fingertips or if there were enough panes, I could play a game of quickly dissolving tic-tac-toe. Lawn-splayed, frozen bicycle corpses lay like fallen battlefield soldiers and snow-covered cars no longer purposeful, looked like they were on a slow, bumper to bumper death march towards a wintery Bataan. Life had thrown a literal wet blanket over everything, and in those moments, I felt as small as I could possibly be like I was permanently memorialized in a still life photo which would not show any signs of movement for three or four months. From my window perch, I could see plumes of smoke escaping like a Lucky Strike exhale from nearby factories and I could hear the rumble of the block-away Long Island Railroad trains as they huffed and puffed like mountain climbers, depositing life-weary road warriors back to their safe houses. People came inside, shook off the snow like canines, stomped their boots like River dancers, and ripped off their coats like Clark Kent peeling off his secret identity business shirt, ready to take flight into the world of warmth. Cheeks were as red as cherries, noses ran like evacuees, and there was a lot of mad hopping around to get the blood running, like engine oil. Radiators clanked like tribal drums and the ritual of being a reformed family began. Like music, dinner served a greater purpose too. All that heat and rising steam made it feel like we were suddenly heading into the tropics. When I was little virtually every meal involved some kind of Campbell’s soup and it did not matter that virtually everything that we ate involved some kind of starch or massive amounts of sugar. We ate as slovenly and as fast as Vikings, with little decorum or etiquette. We loved our slop. Our feed. Our chow. Our bread, our canned corn and our straight from the German bakery desserts. Later dad would cook chestnuts on an open fire, presiding over the stove like a circus vendor. Constant snacking was another winter ritual. It was like we were getting ready for hibernation and had to fortify ourselves with massive amounts of Hostess cakes, Chips Ahoy and Tasty-cakes. We didn’t just fall asleep. By 8 o’clock, long after we had marinated in bubble tubs and been windblown by early, filament smelling hair dryers and watched enough TV to make anyone mute and mindless, we would literally lapse into a coma en route to our twin beds. The walls were cold, but since Dr. Denton had made his house call, we were toasty. The radiators would keep up their calypso beat as our tucked beneath our pillow transistor radios softly sent rock and roll songs and frantic commercials directly to our heads And yet, the winter quiet was always there. It was a counterbalance in equal proportions to the covered cage parakeet chirping, pipe clanging, grown-up TV laugh track and mommy dish rattling, that as you started to fade away, all seemed to drift away like an ocean tide, defying gravity by never returning to shore. We would dream what we lived, because in many ways it was all a dream, even more so now, as I sit here, dressed from head to toe in middle age, listening to my earbuds, feet up hoisted up on a centuries-old pine coffee table, wearing slippers and sweats, where I find myself thinking about the long ago then, which carries me in the arms of memory to visions of my parents, who are now out there somewhere, doing what they did for years of nights, lying side by side, buried in their bed, sleeping beneath blankets of white, protected by the whim of the elements, in a hard-earned, and eternal rest waiting, I think, for me to say goodnight to them.
From my window perch, I could see plumes of smoke escaping like a Lucky Strike exhale from nearby factories and I could hear the rumble of the block-away Long Island Railroad trains as they huffed and puffed like mountain climbers, depositing life-weary road warriors back to their safe houses.
People came inside, shook off the snow like canines, stomped their boots like River dancers, and ripped off their coats like Clark Kent peeling off his secret identity business shirt, ready to take flight into the world of warmth. Cheeks were as red as cherries, noses ran like evacuees, and there was a lot of mad hopping around to get the blood running, like engine oil. Radiators clanked like tribal drums and the ritual of being a reformed family began.
Like music, dinner served a greater purpose too. All that heat and rising steam made it feel like we were suddenly heading into the tropics. When I was little virtually every meal involved some kind of Campbell’s soup and it did not matter that virtually everything that we ate involved some kind of starch or massive amounts of sugar. We ate as slovenly and as fast as Vikings, with little decorum or etiquette. We loved our slop. Our feed. Our chow. Our bread, our canned corn and our straight from the German bakery desserts.
Later dad would cook chestnuts on an open fire, presiding over the stove like a circus vendor. Constant snacking was another winter ritual. It was like we were getting ready for hibernation and had to fortify ourselves with massive amounts of Hostess cakes, Chips Ahoy and Tasty-cakes.
We didn’t just fall asleep. By 8 o’clock, long after we had marinated in bubble tubs and been windblown by early, filament smelling hair dryers and watched enough TV to make anyone mute and mindless, we would literally lapse into a coma en route to our twin beds.
The walls were cold, but since Dr. Denton had made his house call, we were toasty. The radiators would keep up their calypso beat as our tucked beneath our pillow transistor radios softly sent rock and roll songs and frantic commercials directly to our heads
And yet, the winter quiet was always there.
It was a counterbalance in equal proportions to the covered cage parakeet chirping, pipe clanging, grown-up TV laugh track\ and mommy dish rattling, that as you started to fade away, all seemed to drift away like an ocean tide, defying gravity by never returning to shore.
We would dream what we lived, because in many ways it was all a dream, even more so now, as I sit here, dressed from head to toe in middle age, listening to Saint-Seans, feet up hoisted up on a centuries-old pine coffee table, wearing slippers and sweats, where I find myself thinking about the long ago then, which carries in the
From my window perch, I could see plumes of smoke escaping like a Lucky Strike exhale from nearby factories and I could hear the rumble of the block-away Long Island Railroad trains as they huffed and puffed like mountain climbers, depositing life-weary road warriors back to their safe houses.
People came inside, shook off the snow like canines, stomped their boots like River dancers, and ripped off their coats like Clark Kent peeling off his secret identity business shirt, ready to take flight into the world of warmth. Cheeks were as red as cherries, noses ran like evacuees, and there was a lot of mad hopping around to get the blood running, like engine oil. Radiators clanked like tribal drums and the ritual of being a reformed family began.
Like music, dinner served a greater purpose too. All that heat and rising steam made it feel like we were suddenly heading into the tropics. When I was little virtually every meal involved some kind of Campbell’s soup and it did not matter that virtually everything that we ate involved some kind of starch or massive amounts of sugar. We ate as slovenly and as fast as Vikings, with little decorum or etiquette. We loved our slop. Our feed. Our chow. Our bread, our canned corn and our straight from the German bakery desserts.
Later dad would cook chestnuts on an open fire, presiding over the stove like a circus vendor. Constant snacking was another winter ritual. It was like we were getting ready for hibernation and had to fortify ourselves with massive amounts of Hostess cakes, Chips Ahoy and Tasty-cakes.
We didn’t just fall asleep. By 8 o’clock, long after we had marinated in bubble tubs and been windblown by primitive, filament smelling hair dryers and watched enough TV to make anyone mute and mindless, we would literally lapse into a coma en route to our twin beds.
The walls were cold, but since Dr. Denton had made his house call, we were toasty. The radiators would keep up their calypso beat as our tucked beneath our pillow transistor radios softly sent rock and roll songs and frantic commercials directly to our heads
And yet, the winter quiet was always there.
It was a counterbalance in equal proportions to the covered cage parakeet chirping, pipe clanging, grown-up TV laugh track and mommy dish rattling, that as you started to fade away, all seemed to drift away like an ocean tide, defying gravity by never returning to shore.
We would dream what we lived, because in many ways it was all a dream, even more so now, as I sit here, dressed from head to toe in middle age, listening to my earbuds, feet up hoisted up on a centuries-old pine coffee table, where I find myself thinking about the long ago then, which carries me in the arms of memory to visions of my parents, who are now out there somewhere, doing what they did for years of nights, lying side by side, buried in their bed, sleeping beneath blankets of white, protected by the whim of the elements, in a hard-earned, and eternal rest waiting, I think, for me to say goodnight to them.
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