Snow Day Thoughts

Yesterday afternoon, I sat at the kitchen table in my apartment eating a mug full of leftover chili. The storm raged outside. Two feet gradually became two and a half. I listened to the sound of shovels against the pavement and the choir of snow blower engines. I had no plans.

My roommate Dave had just come inside from a walk. He sat on across from me eating an orange, his cheeks still flushed. Like others in New England, we basked in the pause that the historic blizzard had allowed us, in the canceled meetings and blocked off roads. In the spirit of being stuck, we started to throw around our Snow Day Thoughts; the questions, hopes and doubts that came to mind in the wake of canceled meetings and blocked roads.

Snow Day Thoughts have no order.  Like snow days, they just happen, without our consent or control. Here are a few of mine:

1) On snow days, I tend to feel like I have the capability of making my hopes and dreams come true. Don’t we all? I felt like this yesterday when I woke up.  I made coffee and toasted a piece of bread. Outside, everything was white. I’m enough, I thought. I’m enough. Maybe that mantra, and believing in its truth, is all we need to move along in our lives.

2) I spent a lot of time remembering a dinner conversation from last June. It took place at my roommate Becca’s parent’s house.  I thought about the orzo salad and the red wine, and the plants on the back patio where we ate. It was warm enough to not need a sweater. We were talking about careers. I asked Becca if had ever considered following in her Dad’s footsteps to become a pediatrician, and I asked her Dad if he had ever encouraged her. “I tell this to everyone I meet who is considering my profession,” her Dad had said, “Never go into the medical field, especially as a doctor, unless you cannot possibly do anything else.” I loved that: unless you cannot possibly do anything else. I guess some of us know what we must do and some of us have to wander around to find it. 

3) I thought about how when you eat an orange it’s impossible to do anything else. What a gift: surrendering your attention to a fruit until all that’s left is your sticky fingertips and the scattered pieces of the peel piled up on the table. If all food were like that, maybe we’d be healthier. Maybe we'd appreciate it more.

4) I thought about the movie Drinking Buddies, which I watched the night before. In it, Olivia Wilde and Jake Johnson work at a brewery. They spend a lot of time drinking beer together, sipping and pouring, talking about life and their significant others, and falling asleep next to each other on the couch. The movie ended before I wanted it to, with a conclusion that I wasn’t hoping for but made sense. The funny thing about drinking, in that movie and in life in general, is how it brings us together and also keeps us apart.

5) Eventually I had to get out of my apartment, so I walked to a friend’s house, and then to one of the two open bars in my neighborhood. The host had dark gray hair and good posture and wore a sweater vest.  He wrote my name down on the list for a table of four. Then, he pointed us to the corner of the room to wait.  He set up three stools near the window, form an L. “Sit here, ladies” he said, “It’s a great spot.” He told us watched most of the games from that corner. What a nice thing to be able to do--create a space in a crowded room and give it away to those who don’t know any better.

So that’s that. Outside it’s sunny, and most of the cars parked on the street have been shoveled out. We’ve had our time with our Snow Day Thoughts, and now all we can do is move on.