The Snow Day
Observations and Rethinking A Freebie
Last night it began lightly snowing around sunset. There had been dire warnings since Friday that the corner of our world as the state of Tennessee knows it might very well come to an end. Saturday snow had hit Nashville and parts east, especially in the Smokies, but so far Armageddon had passed us by.
Until sunset last night. The snow was light but steady. The girls (13 and 14) were upstairs in their room, reading and (I fear) plotting my doom. Grandpa opened the doorway to the stairs and shouted, “Girls, Martin Luther King’s Birthday tomorrow has been cancelled, so there WILL be school.” We heard two sets of groans. Then the illogic finally seeped through, and I heard one of them shout, “Har-har, Grandpa…”
But this morning, Martin Luther King’s birthday, showed about two inches of pristine snow on the back porch. I posted on Facebook:
I had an Urgent Care appointment scheduled for 8:20 this morning (a toe that my wife thought might be infected). We both looked outside, then she suggested we take a look at said toe. I had kept a shoe off that foot all day yesterday, and we both agreed this morning it looked much better.
It was that, plus I knew the normally 10 minute drive to the Doc In The Box might take 3 hours, claim countless lives, and cause our Farm Bureau agent to begin sobbing hysterically at the thought of all the paperwork. So I called and cancelled the appointment.
We both figured no one would show up at the clinic regardless. After all, there was SNOW on the streets, and the closest snow plow was about four hundred miles away.
I’m sure the city street superintendent was busy yesterday with the municipal Visa card, buying up every box of Morton’s salt in town, but that’s another story…
Around 8:30 this morning I walked back in to the house from my office, passing through the kitchen, where Grandpa’s phone chimed. He looked at it, rolled his eyes, and walked in the living room where Grandma, my wife, and the 13-year-old were watching some movie and eating breakfast.
Grandpa merrily announced: “No school tomorrow!” The thirteen year old catapulted herself from her chair and began dancing like a whirling dervish. “Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah…” and launches into some song by Taylor Swift.
They all sound the same to me. It’s just noise. I think Taylor’s a flash in the pan anyway.
I shook my head in disgust. “Wow,” I thought to myself. “How sad the kid hates school that much.”
Then I stopped. Who the HELL am I kidding? It’s not that she hates school. It’s that she LOVES snow days.
Have I gotten SO old that I have forgotten that feeling?
Looking back, initially snow days were the cheapest high I’d ever have in my life! An unsupervised time during a day that was supposed to be brimming with teachers constantly telling you what to do, how to do it, and then raging at the entire class, often with a Cat O’ Nine Tails, because you didn’t do it exactly their way.
“Vee haff veys off meking you learn…”
The Florence Supermax is a federal prison in Colorado that is the highest security, most controlled in the United States. It houses the worst of the worst, plus, I believe, a bunch of narco terrorists from South America who, were they to escape would pose a national security threat.
So, imagine giving inmate Manuel Noriega the keys to the front door at Florence, telling him, “Goobye! Seeya! Vamoose! Don’t let the steel door hit you on your murderous ass on the way out!”
THAT’S how the average student feels upon being told he/she has a snow day the next day.
A day without teachers, and, in many cases, without parents – no authority figures to plan a tortuous day of FILL IN THE BLANK WITH ALL THE STUFF ADULTS LOVE TO PLAN FOR YOU IN ORDER TO MAKE YOUR LIFE A LIVING HELL.
Where I grew up, sledding was a great way to spend the day. But there was always sleeping in (as the 14-year-old is currently doing with great vigor and elan), talking (or today texting) on the phone with your friends, watching television…
Today’s Snowday Kids have the luxury of watching hundreds of channels. Hundreds, nay, thousands of on-demand programs and movies…
While back in MY day (when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth), we had five channels. FIVE. And from 10 til 3, three of the channels were given over to soap operas – the bane of every 20th century Snowday Kid’s existence.
I remember when Susan Lucci actually looked young, and still had innocent hopes for an Emmy…
The other two channels sometimes had decent reruns, or really old movies, but it was hit or miss. You might score with a John Wayne western.
Or you were stuck with old Lassie movies that even for a ten-year-old were so predictable as to be infantile. By the third time someone exclaimed, “What Lassie? Trouble at the mill old girl?” I’d be begging to whip June Lockhart with Lassie’s leash.
Luckily, by 3 or so, Gilligan’s Island reruns would kick in. If you were truly blessed, the independent station in Chicago would run Gilligan at 3, and then the independent station in Indianapolis would run Gilligan at 3:30.
But that was a cheap victory. Why? Because that 3pm time slot filled with a tanned Mary Ann walking around in short shorts was available to you regardless! In other words, the snow day ended at 3, because that was the time you otherwise would have gotten home from school!
And as a kid it dawns on you as you begin to do the math, a Snow Day really IS like a HALF day. After 3, it’s just like any other. Oh, SNAP!
The magic is over.
For perspective, of course if a parent quizzed you as to how long a school day was, you’d provide a vivid enough description that would lead mom or dad to discover that every day at school was the Bataan Death March.
Hope is left forlornly at the front steps at school, only to be retrieved a solid SEVEN HOURS LATER when you make your escape.
But it’s not that the true end of a snow day is at 3pm. It gets worse.
If the snow is only a few inches or so, and your municipality has a regrettable track record of efficiently removing snow (damn their competence!), around noon you begin to realize you might still have to go to school…TOMORROW!
Oh, for the love of God and everything that is Pure!
As the day ticks from noon onward, your gut begins to twist…with each passing hour you scan the winter clouds in desperation, beseeching the Snow Gods to return…not to cause traffic accidents that could harm others mind you, but with just enough nasty weather that even the sadistic Mengele-like beast better known as The School Superintendent, might recoil in fear, then cancel school for a second straight day.
I realize today that I experienced genuine, crippling adult-like anxiety at a remarkably early age. It made my early brooding persona attractive to older women, but it’s probably also why today my liver is now the hardest substance known to science.
But I digress.
All this ultimately led me to believe, at the ripe old age of 11 or so, that Snow Days were really a Sucker’s Paradise, lasting only 4 short hours, from 8am til noon.
So I watch the girls today, happily lost in their innocence, enjoying the things that today’s young teens do for their amusement (and as an ancillary benefit to them, my lasting irritation). I truly envy their naiveté.
I watch the 13-year-old out my office window, romping with our dog in the fresh white snow, observing a true Norman Rockwell moment, and I realize: these are the salad days of their youth, before The World ultimately wounds them, hardens them, steals their childish innocence like a thief in the night…
…when it finally becomes crystal clear, as their pureness of heart takes its last desperate jagged breath, and cynicism seizes with its cold gnarled claws their delicate sinless throats…
That Snow Days are for chumps.
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