February 2, 2011

Snow Day 2011: a Snow Day Retrospective

Every ten years, I get a snow day. Perhaps I only remember two.

The first was in North Bay in 1991. North Bay will always seem much colder than any other place I've ever lived, and my memory of the snow was that one morning it piled up 6 feet high at our doorstep. Perhaps that's relative since I had probably just cracked 5 feet in height. The highlight of that day was filling garbage bags with snow and using them as sleds down the driveway. It was all very folk art of us. We couldn't have imagined that something like the internet would be around some day, and I am positive that garbage bags were made a lot stronger 20 years ago when it didn't matter as much what went into landfills. By 2 in the afternoon, we were probably in the basement watching Jenny Jones and that was as perfect a day as a slow-to-develop-preteen-would-need until a few months later when someone introduced me to chewing tobacco and slow dancing.


In 2006, I heard this song over 200 times and went ten months without seeing snow.

My second snow day was in Vancouver, probably 2001. Vancouverites are like Americans when it snows: the city shuts down emotionally, people become "shocked" by the mere existence of cold precipitation that doesn't land on Whistler, and everyone starts driving like a raccoon in a live-action kids movie would, especially if there wasn't another raccoon working the pedals. As I was part of the workforce in '01, slinging vitamins for a company owned by the cult of Jehovah's Witness, this snow day was less about exploration, and likely turned into an excuse to drink on a Wednesday afternoon. Jenny Jones was still on TV, so I probably watched it. The best part of this snow day was that by noon, the snow had melted and I actually saw grass. The Vancouver snow day was like a Sphinx riddle: what acts like an osteoporotic ex-tennis pro in the morning and actually plays tennis by mid-afternoon? Or something.


In 2010 Captain Beefheart died, and it snowed all day.

That's it. Until 2021,
SnowDayve.

2 comments:

Benjamin said...

Nice Anne Murray reference.

David Brock said...

Any time I can get one in, I do.