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Memory is a weird thing.
One day you can suddenly remember the Eagles game you went to at Veteran’s Stadium. You can see your view of the field, feel the chill in the air. You can see friends and family there with you. You remember the idiot a couple rows back who, upset at something the Eagles had done, threw the remnants of a soft pretzel at the field, but hit you instead. You clearly remember the piece of pretzel had mustard on it.
Even though it never happened.
The forecast this weekend mentions an 80% chance of snow on Sunday. The high will be 40°, and today is 60° so the chance of any significant or insignificant accumulation is pretty low.
That’s too bad.
It snowed in January. I ended up with between 3″ and 4″ at my house. I liked it. The dog liked it. It was … okay. It was not the snow event I’d been hoping for, waiting for.
I guess we’ve already had our once-a-decade big snow in 2003. For that snow, I was in Las Vegas and missed the flakes coming down. I also missed coming home when I was supposed to thanks to a snow closure at Philadelphia International, but that was okay. Worse places to be than Las Vegas for an extra day, and the guys at the parking lot helped shovel out my car. I somehow ended up being charged a vacation day for that day even though my then employer was closed because of snow emergencies, but I’m not bitter about that anymore … really.
What I am bitter about is the lack of big snow. I like snow. I want several feet of snow every winter. And not a seasonal accumulation of several feet. I want multiple snowstorms, each delivering several feet of snow to my house.
Digging out in 1983
It used to be like that. I don’t think it’s just the gauzy film of memory. This snowstorm, for example, in 1983. That’s what I’m talking about. Okay, maybe my dad didn’t relish shoveling our driveway multiple times during the snowfall, but my entire family liked taking walks in the snow and how it looked. My mom felt so strongly about the look of a snow-covered lawn that any playing in the snow was restricted to the backyard so our footprints wouldn’t sully the front yard.
Much of who I am today can be traced back to a chilly evening in 1989. Not knowing then how important Jan. 30, 1989 would be to me, I have no recollection of what I ate that day, what I wore or what the temperature was (I said chilly but a search tells me the high that day was 50 and the low 35, so not so chilly).
I can guess I took a little extra time picking out what to wear and how to wear my hair. I would have walked from my dorm room in Founders (B-2, if you want to know), across the practice fields and into the BSC. I likely wandered around the theater, trying to figure out which door I should go in. I may have encountered people I already knew (Kris, Jay and Viv). I’m pretty sure I passed people who I had never met but who would become important parts of my life.
The Cast
“Santa’s coming. Santa’s coming.”
That’s what I kept saying this morning as Eckie and I waited outside the front door and the sound of sirens filled the air. It’s the last Sunday before Christmas. The day when Santa returns to the North Pole.
The coolest thing I saw today was on Wil Wheaton’s blog.
You remember A Ha. The really cool Norwegian band from the 80s? The one-hit wonder? The incredibly awesome video that you’d sit through all of Friday Night Videos just to see?
Here’s a literal version of it. Yes, the first 45 seconds are just the video. Wait for it, people, wait for it.
Is it better than I described it, Penny?
