SHOW QUIET

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.

At first blush, leaves rustle like brothers wrestling in their bedroom, the sky turns ice-tray gray and the air churns into a thick, icy froth, as sweet as fresh milk, as faraway traffic and with it, modern times,  slowly get erased from the soundtrack.

The world rattles like a thousand festive maracas, making a splashy diva entrance like the wind they call Maria Carey.

This shakes the last of autumn color right out of the picture like a giant etch-a-sketch and strips the trees bare, leaving them startled, skeletal and bald.

It reminds you how unequivocal time is.

Fall falls like a swaying parachute, as if accompanied by George Winston playing the piano in his socks.

But winter arrives like an invasion of heavily armed stormtroopers.

War has begun.

Inside, in our living room bunkers, music sounds crisper and more alert than usual.

Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven all feel immediate, responsive and resurrected.

We augment the orchestration with an arrangement of crackling fireplaces, popping popcorn, whistling tea kettles and the low heeled murmur of a weary TV set.

We listen attentively to the never changing news and weather reports like we’re receiving vital life-changing transmissions from the front.

I find myself far less lonely and isolated than I do during other seasons that always make me want to escape the premises or the premise of my life.

It’s nice knowing that you don’t have to be someplace.

Or even better, that you don’t want to be someplace.

When I was little, winter felt like the arrival of a Mary Poppins. A child’s magical best friend, who performed grand tricks and turned our world into a giant snow globe.

The windows would steam up like mommy’s late night 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 stalwart 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 faucets 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.

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 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 last minute 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 pillows 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 proportion to the parakeet chirping, pipe clanging, TV cackling and mommy dish rattling, that, as you started to fade away, all seemed to drift outwards 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 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 deep 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.