(Originally
published 12/20/16)
I have a
particular holiday snapshot lodged in my memory bank: I am outside at
Christmastime with my best friend, Johnny—yes, we played outdoors in the early
1970s, regardless of the season or temperature. My mother is putting up the holiday
decorations, which included green and red tin foil squares cut to fit each
window of our front French door and, too, my grandmother’s adjoining one. It is
on or near December 15, which was, unofficially as I recall, the earliest date
that we—and many others in the neighborhood—decorated for Christmas. Nowadays
it is before Thanksgiving.
Anyway, as
if Christmas were not enough joy for us to process, it began to snow. My bestie
and I were ecstatic. A White Christmas—snow on the ground—was in the offing. Or
so we thought. Snow has a habit of vanishing quickly during New York City
Decembers. Erratic temperature swings and rain are common. And I believe the snow
from four decades ago, which was not very much to begin with, disappeared well
before December 25.
Fast
forward to the present. I woke up this past Saturday morning to find two to
three inches of snow on the ground. Suffice it to say, it did not bring me the
level of joy that snowfalls did in the Decembers of my youth. In fact, the
sight of it in the here and now brought no joy whatsoever. All I could think
about was what had become the new normal for me. I would have to both shovel
the stuff and navigate it—with a prosthetic right knee. And slips and falls in
the Great Outdoors are something I wish to avoid. Winter weather, however,
increases the likelihood of such mishaps. So far, I have been lucky. A couple
of winters ago, I shoveled up more than fifty inches of the white stuff and traversed
the highways and byways on foot without incident. But
snow stress is all
too real, and something that—once upon a time—was entirely foreign to me.
Shifting gears,
I nearly got run over by grandma yesterday. A motorist came to a complete stop
at a stop sign, which was the right thing to do. So, I decided to cross the
street. Pedestrians have the right-of-way. I was halfway across when the
formerly motionless car accelerated and whizzed just past me. It was then that
I noticed its driver—an elderly white-haired woman. And she did not flinch.
Granny was clearly unaware that I was very in her path. Had she mowed me down,
she would have been none the wiser—and, I have no doubt, her Stop & Shop
grocery expedition would have commenced as planned.
So, I
lived to tell. And I will tell you, too, about some local Christmas tree
sellers. If possible, I prefer patronizing the
little guys, but these
little guys left a lot to be desired. They would not quote a tree price until
they saw the tree in its full flower. Despite the various tree barks colored
for height identification, the prices were not based on height. Instead, they
were determined on the smarmy whim of the holiday equivalent of used-car
salesmen. When I spied these same entrepreneurs today, they were comfortably
ensconced in their plastic enshrouded lean-to and playing loud music—and not
Christmas-themed. There were a lot of unsold trees there. I cannot imagine why.
(Photos
from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)
