By JAMES BROWN
GLASGOW — “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow” is surely the phrase my children are singing like little snowbirds (though they are not so little anymore).
The kids have been out of school so long, they can’t tell which way to turn a book. I caught one of them staring at a book with bewilderment the other day before they turned it right side up. (That’s a hyperbolic joke to punctuate the point. It didn’t really happen. I promise, the rest of this column will be absolutely, 100 percent true, other than a bit coming about a hardened brain. Read on, please.)
I don’t know about everyone else’s children, but mine have experienced a Christmas break — broken by a few frames here and there of a classroom flitting by — that is reminiscent of the days of yore when people my age were ambling through the white hallways with the monotony occasionally interrupted by rows of cursedly difficult to open lockers. While we got nearly a month out for Christmas break, we also had to provide our own padlocks. My, how these kids have it made these days.
As for me, and I suspect many of us who have not been able to escape the workplace for any other reason than to drive to and fro, snow ain’t all it used to be.
I remember those days last year when a dusting of snow was a cause of celebration; a time to run over a clean white blanket snapped tightly over the grass that squeaked under foot like sand at a beach as my children ran screaming from the barrage of snowballs being hurled in their general direction. (Think Will Ferrell in “Elf” in the Central Park snowball fight scene.) I think that was last year, or maybe it was the year before. Perhaps my snow Scrooge started longer ago than can be recalled by this slowly hardening brain. (I guess the brain doesn’t technically harden, the veins taking blood to the brain harden, reducing oxygen levels and causing some side effects, such as lowered computation skills, and an inability to remember what one ate for breakfast five minutes ago, but all that doesn’t sound nearly as poetic as saying the brain hardens, which then juxtaposes to a hardened heart in the poetic sense, which then connects to the Scrooge bit behind ... wait, where was I.)
Ah, yes. Why the kids still love the snow and fondness for it has left me.
I recall my first snow. (I think I recall it, but the brain just isn’t what it once was, as previously discussed, I think.) My grandmother had a large cold house and it snowed while we slept under her very warm electric blanket. She always had an electric blanket. We awoke at first light (getting a little poetic again) and tiptoed across the bedroom floor to the kitchen. (We didn’t tip toe because we were trying to be quiet. We did so because that’s what one does when they are trying to skitter over a hardwood floor without rugs on the way to the kitchen.) We looked out the kitchen window to see the white blanket covering the Earth and making everything clean.
Actually, the thing most beautiful about snow is that it makes the world look bright and clean. One of the best views is a parking lot at night that has been undisturbed by cars and people. Lamp light splashes down and flows out. The white of the snow reflectes the light into the night, giving the darkness a soft glow.
The parking lots of the schools in the area, because no one had been there for two days, were the best places to see the effect. On the way home Friday night, after dark, after a week in the chair at the desk behind a computer screen pecking away on the white keys of a used keyboard, there was a pervasive calmness in the world, in Glasgow.
It was a wonderful feeling to experience, sort of similar to flitting across a cold floor with warm anticipation of what might be seen; sort of like the children’s screams of joy while running from their father as he aims to pummel them with snowballs. They better be ready because here I come.
James Brown is editor of the Glasgow Daily Times. He can be reached by e-mail at jbrown(at)glasgowdailytimes. com.
