Don't let it snow

My dad hates snow. Passionately. Whenever he tells stories about his boyhood in Maine, “the asshole of the earth” in his opinion, invariably he includes a rant about how deep the snow got, how they’d have to dig out from the house through six-foot drifts (they grew to ten feet in the retelling) just to use the outhouse out back. “And it wasn’t heated,” he would add, as if we couldn’t have guessed.

It’s ironic that he was born on December 12, and so far north, and that he continues to live so far north (Massachusetts), for it means that more often than not he celebrates his birthday surrounded by the dreaded white stuff. Today his best friends came by to wish him well and give him a present – a snowball – which he rejected with the requisite good humor.

This hatred is hardly trivial, however. It runs deep and for good reason. Not least among his many reasons is that it nearly cost him the life of his second daughter, then seven, hit by a car when its driver couldn’t see through the storm and couldn’t stop in time on the slippery road. She survived, and re-learned to walk, talk, count, and read alongside her baby brother – me – amedical miracle, one of several my family would witness in the years to come. The event reshaped our family in countless ways; a psychologist would have a field day analyzing its effect on me alone, the seventh child of nine, suddenly thrust into the care of an elderly neighbor before I was done breastfeeding. Were proper bonds formed between parent and child? Did subconscious jealousies emerge? Does it explain my love of the stage, give me a deep-seated need for attention and the love of strangers?

If it created issues of separation among us, we seem to have moved past them now. But my dad’s hatred of snow abides. Even now, as he suffers from cancer, a steady dose of morphine causing him to sleep most of his days away and endure day and night in a drug-addled haze, his hatred of snow gives him focus. When I arrived a few weeks ago to help my mom care for him in what we thought would be his final days, a winter storm was threatening. He could barely talk, needed help standing, sitting up and walking. But he understood snow. Prior to supplying him with the real thing on his birthday, his friends Dick and Caroline had given him a hard white foam ball and stickpins – his anti-snow voodoo doll. It was 2 or 3 AM one night, time for his meds, when we mentioned the incoming storm. He sat right up in bed, stood under his own power, shuffled with purpose to his dresser, and began stabbing the tacky talisman with a vengeance. This from a man who didn’t even leave his bed for meals and who could barely breathe without an oxygen tank.

Dad has made an amazing recovery since then. He now seems strong enough to survive many more weeks, if not months. While credit goes to the attentions of his many children and some intelligent recent changes to his schedule of meds, I credit his desire to best his life-long nemesis as well. His first two attempts at voodoo succeeded, but he was frustrated on the third try: ten inches of snow dumped down on New England for his birthday weekend. He is determined not to die in the snow, I think. Looking out the window, it appears he still has some work to do on this planet before he leaves us.

If I’m right about that, I have a secret to keep from him. If he’s not leaving until the snow is gone, I’m rooting for one hell of a ski season.