Honkin Flakes

The snow shovelers are out again. I heard one of them scrapping the sidewalk at 5:45 this morning, a little surprising since its Saturday. Why in the name of God is anybody shoveling at this hour? The sounds are filtered and diminished by the time they reach my ears on the third floor. I needed to get up anyway. Sleep hasn’t been the same since I broke my arm.

I start to move around my little apartment, my morning routine already well worn. My slippers, the heat, coffee on, juice and pills, up and down the narrow kitchen. I like to say I can step from one end of my apartment to the other in three strides. That’s an exaggeration, but not much of one. I’ve scaled down. I still need to throw away a good half of what I frantically packed into boxes and broke my back hauling out of my previous home. I know I’ll feel better once I do it, but I'm still a ways from letting it go

Last night I was talking to one of Anna’s friend’s moms. She's a person I don’t see too much anymore; since my divorce we’re ships passing in the teen chauffeur night. Most of these mom’s only know about my accident and for that matter,everything else in my life, filtered and diminished by my soon to be ex-wife. This mom commented “This must have been the worst year of your life”. I appreciated the sentiment, as it was an acknowledgment that I was actually standing there in front of her, but fortunately it wasn’t true. On the contrary I can honestly say that this has been one of the best years of my life. Even the broken arm had its rightful place in the scheme of things. It completed the strophe; new job, new apartment, new roads to get home and to work on; all new. Painful and exhausting at times, but definitive and finally moving in the right direction.

I went downstairs and stepped out onto the front porch. It was wet and cold outside but it felt good to get back down to the street where there was a chance tha I might catch a glimpse of the mystery tramp every once in a while. A guy walked by with his dog on a leash and nodded a greeting. The snow was still falling in big honkin’ flakes like at the end of “Dubliners”. It was a part of the book where Joyce seemingly got a little emotional, maybe even choked up. I remember a college English teacher at UCSB who once asked my class whether we thought Joyce had intentionally become so floral in his writing, in contrast to the rest of the book. To my ears that passage had been a sweet moment; I almost felt tears welling up when I read it. In his description of the falling snow, the blurring, the putting to bed of everything it touched, Joyce was certainly talking about death. The writing was sentimental, but sentimentality falls into a new relief when the subject is death.

It seemed important to this English teacher, who I now realize was actually just a grad student only a few years older than me, that Joyce was being ironic. I didn’t agree, but when I haltingly put forth my theory it was quickly dispatched without much of a struggle on my part. After all, he was the teacher and it was my first college level English class.

My arm’s finally to the point where I can scrape ice off my wind shield again, albeit inefficiently. It occurs to me that I too might be waking somebody up, even at this hour, but this won’t take long and, unless they need to get up too, they can go right back to sleep. How’s that for rationalizing? I’ve become one of the snow shovelers.