First Snow
I was out walking the dog earlier. It’s a beautiful quiet night, with the temperature in the mid-twenties, light snowflakes gently floating in the barely noticeable wind. Shelby romped through the drifts which had started to form on the sidewalk. She’s a happy dog, a mutt with long, thin red hair with black spots. The SPCA said she’s a cross between a dalmatian and an Irish setter. All I know is that she likes to play, can fetch rather well, and really enjoys the snow. She’s much better than those wiener dogs and poodles that I see people walking in their little sweaters, dog-parkas and booties. Whenever I see a little dog like that, I can’t help but think about how embarrassed it must feel, especially when Shelby yelps a dog’s version of “Hello! You look soooooo cute today! Hee-hee-hee!”
As we walked around the block, I watched the reflections of holiday lights reflecting across snow-covered lawns. It reminded me of a time, in the winter after I graduated, when the girls had a murder mystery party. Joe and I had an apartment at the time right off La Salle Avenue at the time. I was still cooking at the Corner Office, and was in the process of applying for jobs around the country. Joe had dropped out of school a year earlier, and managed a chain restaurant in Amherst. He also played guitar and sang for a band that covered songs played on the local rock stations. It was mostly album rock they played: Rush, Triumph, Van Halen (before Sammy Hagar joined them), and Max Webster were regular favorites. They avoided the “hair bands” popularized by music videos on MTV, and were working on getting more original material into their gigs.
I was dating Nora at the time. She was a curvaceous Polish-Italian girl with long, thick, dark brown hair with eyes that were so dark, I got lost looking into them. Her mouth was full and wide, and were she about six inches taller, she’d probably have been a model. We met, of all places, at a bar dancing to the Infidels covering a very long version of “Me & Bobby McGee”. Joe was dating her roommate Tammie, who was taller, slender, with short, dirty-blond hair, blue-gray eyes, and was Irish-German-Scottish-and-about-six-other-nationalities. They were high school sweethearts who came to Buffalo from a small town southeast of Syracuse. They came here to go to school and get out of a Podunk town where you didn’t have a future if you didn’t work your daddy’s farm.
Joe and I were roommates since we were sophomores. We had several classes in common, and started studying at the library together. After I dated Nora for about six months, the girls decided to get an apartment together. It only made sense, because once we got out of work and school, the four of us pretty much spent all our time together. The girls thought it was a natural thing to do. They were always passing out at each others’ apartments when they weren’t sleeping at our place. It was funny; Tammie knew more about me than I knew about Joe, even though he and I lived together. Nora and Tammie were women, and women have to talk and gossip all the time. Lord knows, they talked to each other about everything under the sun. To this day, they are still best friends.
The girls decided, after a drunken evening the night before Thanksgiving, to have a party. Since murder mystery parties were the rage, it was decided to be one of those. The party was to be kind of like playing “Clue”, except with more people, and everyone dressed for their part. The girls went to several stores and looked at different games, and planned their own game, creating the characters, theme, plot, and making all the clues. I, with my technical expertise, was to be a MacGyver-type character. Joe, with his long hair was going to be a dead-head rocket scientist. Nora, with her shapely body, was going to be a belly dancing private eye. Tammie, who was studying to be an elementary schoolteacher was, quite obviously a schoolteacher. Kenny, a black friend of ours, was to come as a Jamaican scholar who was into smoking the ganja and listening to patriotic marches. Sue, who was oriental, was to be a transvestite turned Geisha. Jeanine, who was the straight one of the bunch, was to be a prostitute turned nun, and her boyfriend Rick was going to be Father O’Malley, the priest who “converted” her. Nora’s brother John, who was on probation for selling marijuana, was going to be a cop. His girlfriend Shawna, whose father listened to what was then a budding conservative radio industry, was to be a civil rights attorney that worked primarily with the homeless and needy.
The party was going to be on the second Friday in December, and we were all to arrive in costume. The girls had made cards which detailed costumes to wear, props to bring, and little biographies for each character. We were all to show up at about seven thirty, dressed and in character. No one “knew” any of the other characters, and part of the fun was to learn and guess what the other characters were supposed to be. The storyline was that everyone was booked for the weekend in a motel, and after everyone arrived, the motel owner would be found dead in his office. Eventually, through a communal process of elimination, the murderer would be found out and the game over. That is, if everyone didn’t get too drunk before it was all over.
That was the premise, anyway. Unfortunately, the day of the party, the weather was worse than lousy. A mother of a snowstorm was coming in, and most people were were spending their time preparing to while away the weekend cooped up, watching TV, and occasionally going out to shovel lots of snow. By five in the afternoon, we had over a foot and a half of snow on the roads, with more on the way. The mayor was telling everyone to stay at home with a six-pack, and all unnecessary travel was banned. Cars were stranded on the Kensington and Scajaquada Expressways, and the Thruway was closed from the Pennsylvania line to Syracuse.
One would think, after living in Buffalo all their lives, that people would know how to drive in bad weather. Unfortunately, this is not the case, especially in Buffalo. Cars weave all over the roads, and tend to drive between lanes ignoring any lines in the road, yellow or white. People drive painstakingly slow, or fishtail and do donuts down the street. Then there’s the odd moron who decides he can drive faster than everyone else, but he doesn’t have his headlights on so you don’t see him until it’s almost too late. People make it a habit of stopping after driving halfway through intersections. There are Metro buses to deal with, and to make things really bad few, if any, plows go through to clean the streets. They usually wait until later in the night when most cars are off the roads or buried, and hopefully the snow has stopped.
Consequently, by seven o’clock, practically everyone had called in and canceled. I understood, because driving home from school was a bitch. Traffic was terribly slow, and what would normally have been a twenty-minute drive was turned into an hour-and-a-half-long nail-biting experience. I picked up Joe at the apartment, and we got to the girls’ place right at seven-thirty. They had just gotten home from work themselves and were listening to the cancellations on their answering machines. It did not look promising, so we started drinking.
Nora was really pissed about the weather. She had put a great deal of time into planning everything. The party appealed to her creative side, as she was studying mass media and wanted to go to Hollywood to be a filmmaker. She was in the kitchen with Tammie griping about the weather. Joe and I were in the living room watching TV and getting high. After listening to Nora and Tammie in the other room bitching for ten minutes, the idea to save the evening hit me. I grabbed the remote, and started channel surfing. It was a couple of weeks before Christmas, and I was sure “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” would be on the tube.
I was right.
I called the girls into the living room, and got several shot glasses for each of us and poured a pitcher of beer each. My idea was to play the “Grinch Game”. The rules were simple. Every time the word “Who” was mentioned, we were to drink a shot of beer. During lulls, each person had to refill their shot glasses. There’s one part where I swear Boris Karloff says “Who” about twenty times in about thirty seconds; it’s almost impossible to keep up with him. Nevertheless, everyone who was unable to drink a particular shot of beer had to put a dollar on the table. The winner was the person with the least amount of money on the table; that person got to keep all of the money. In the case of a tie, the cash was split 50/50. With or without the money, it is the drunkest half-hour anyone could ever have.
It took a bit of convincing, and several hits off of a bowl, to get the girls to relent from their bitch session and join us in the living room. They got there just in time for the show to start. Ultimately, Tammie lost. She could never keep up with the rest of us, although I was quite surprised that she didn’t wind up in the bathroom involuntarily disposing of all the beer she had just drank. The whole thing was a wash, though, because Joe wound up winning, that rat bastard.
We sat and talked and partied for a couple of hours that night. We had plenty to drink, so there was no reason to go to any of the neighborhood bars. We had plenty of food, so there was no need to go to the store for anything. We had a great time, and laughed until our stomachs hurt.
Feeling romantic, Nora and I bundled up, and in our drunkenness, decided to go for a walk. At eleven o’clock at night, there was no one outside except for the two of us. We could see the tracks left by someone walking down the street perhaps a half-hour earlier. Even though the wind had stopped, the air was quite brisk, and snow lazily fell from the sky. Massive drifts stretched across the street, glistening in the glow of the street lamps. Miniature avalanches fell off trees as we walked by. The snow was too cold to pack into snowballs to throw at each other, so we walked arm in arm around the neighborhood for about an hour or so, enjoying the beauty of it all before the plows, cars, trucks, and snowblowers ruined it.
There is a certain beauty in the first snow of the season. You can catch a glimpse of it on a Christmas card or in a Currier and Ives painting, but you really can’t appreciate it until you see it for yourself. You have to put on your parka, get your gloves on, feel the crispness in the air as it chills and clears your sinuses, and see the minute flakes as they blow across the top layer of snow. You have to feel the delicate crystals melt instantly when they spray your face. It’s nice, letting the dog romp around and play in it while you look at all the lawn ornaments, houses, cars and trees covered in just the right amount of snow. It’s the definition of tranquility, and I’m glad I’m able to enjoy it.
