Blizzard

On my way to work yesterday, the snow was coming down hard, but it was too warm for it to stick. There was a sense of hushed excitement - anticipation- throughout the City as people waited and wondered about the coming storm and rushed to get errands done. As I approached the building, I ran into one of our staff leaving - he lives in Jersey City, and he was making a dash for the train before NJ Transit shut down. "I've been here since earlier," he said hurriedly, "everything is done," by which he meant cleaning and setting up. An entire group of volunteers had cancelled, but between a few scheduled people and a few others who live in the area, we wound up with enough to get dinner done. Upstairs, Doug was slammed, seeing client after client who needed psych evals, medications, forms filled out. Stephen, stuck in Singapore, kept asking me for snow updates all afternoon. His chances of being able to fly in today were receding with each inch of snow that fell. By the time we left at 8pm, several inches were coating the ground, railings, and trees outside the church. Port authority was completely closed, all buses cancelled, so I walked an extra block to get the train. Getting off at Fort Hamilton Parkway, I stepped out into a postcard of a wintery scene - the winding path, the streetlight, the swirl of snowflakes. The path was about 5" deep by then, and the snow was getting in my eyes, so I floundered my way up to the road, where school employees were snow-blowing their sidewalks, and then to the scaffold in front of the building. I shook off as much snow as possible, like one of the dogs romping in the park, and entered the lobby thinking of a trip to Gloucester when I was a kid. I was still at Little Red, so I must have been 8 or so when Dad decided to take me and my best friend, Georgia, to Gloucester during winter break. Gloucester is really somewhere people visit in the summer, enjoying its gorgeous beaches and ice cream stands and beautiful hikes. In the winter, it contracts with the summer businesses closed and only the actual inhabitants in residence. But Dad grew up in Gloucester, so he is not one of the summer people, and this time he decided to bring us kids along. I was young enough that I don't remember if it was snowing when we got on the Amtrak train to Boston, but it certainly was when we switched to the commuter train with the big purple stripe. It must have been rush hour, I remember the train being full of mostly men with briefcases and newspapers. It was chugging through the snow and then jerked to a sudden stop in the middle of the woods. A tree, weakened by the weight of the snow, had fallen across the tracks. At first Dad, who had grown up walking through the acres of Gloucester woods his family owmed to get to school,looked around and said, "we're on our property anyway, we can get out and walk from here," but the railroad staff were not going to let him get off there with two little girls. Instead a bunch of men got out and rolled the tree off the tracks and the train continued on the way. When we arrived in Gloucester, the snow was coming down so hard you could barely see what was in front of you, and the poncho my mother had dressed me in was contributing to the problem by blowing up in front of my face. Dad took each of us by a hand and towed us across the parking lot into the only place that was open - the Rhum Line, a bar. The crew of regulars was jolly and singing. I had never been in a bar, and I was fascinated by such happy adults. They were not expecting children, but they dredged up a couple of dusty packets of hot chocolate for us, while Dad tried to figure out how to get out to our house in a storm so intense that regular cars were off the road. I don't know how it came about, but eventually the Gloucester Police, their car outfitted with heavy duty tires and chains, came and retrieved us and delivered us to the house where Helen was waiting to strip off our wet clothes and toss them in the dryer. The next day, the snow had stopped falling, and the whole back lawn was sparkling in the sun. We were bundled up in mittens and scarves and set loose to play in the magical world of pristine snow, so clean you could eat it or roll in it or build a snow man.