There. That wasn't so bad!
The winter! the brightness that blinds you, The white land locked tight as a drum,The cold fear that follows and finds you, The silence that bludgeons you dumb.The snows that are older than history, The woods where the weird shadows slant;The stillness, the moonlight, the mystery, I’ve bade ’em good-by—but I can’t.
Robert W. Service - The Spell of the Yukon
The next mope or mope-ette who offers me another Currier & Ives observation on the white wonderland that is Chicago will receive a lengthy, passionate and serpentine French Kiss from me, after three Marlboros and 22 ounces of Dunkin Donuts coffee have worked their charms..
Snow was predicted. Classes were cancelled. I did not get the news until I had plowed my dependable and my tenacious 2008 Chevy Malibu from Morgan Park to Gresham neighborhoods and opened the gates to the faculty parking lot on the southwest side of 79th & Sangamon and venerable Leo High School.
News radio WBBM AM 78 informed me that the roads were impassable, but assured that salt-plows were out in force, reinforcing Rahm Emanuel's Chicagoland mythopoeic formulae that Old Coon Eyes is in fact not only Residential Voter Friendly, but Presidential Timber. Empirically, I'd need to disagree. Western Avenue from 107th Street to 79th Street was Ice Station Zebra and 79th Street east to Sangamon was right out of a Robert W. Service Poem.
The journey was filled with adventure - Numb-nuts who have four-wheel traction vehicles, habitues of late-night drinking emporiums who have reached bullet-proof capacities of strong drink determined to have their homes and apartment buildings 'pull up next to' their vehicles and the natural obstacles -arboreal limbs of varied sizes placed by the laws of force, weight and gravity onto the side streets. With the grace of God, the Illinois Rules of the Road, a smidgen of common sense and GM craftsmanship, I arrived safe and sound of limb and vender.
Now, I will engage my mountain of missives and await the arrival of Leo President Dan McGrath to discuss the mysteries of Institutional Advancement.
I never seem to get bored. Now, I shall take calls -' Is there school today?' No, there is not. Enjoy the splendors of winter in Chicagoland!
