The Winter of Our Discontent ... and Longing for Spring

On and off over the last month, I’ve been out my window at a silent, peaceful (and sometimes not so peaceful) snowfall ... once, I absolutely had to pick up the mail, so eased my way down the ramp outside ... stepped onto the level pavement, with about 3 inches of snow on it, and completely wiped out, landing on my left knee.  Immediately rolled into a fetal position in the snow and stayed there.

Which sounds like an odd thing to do, but I had learned from experience that because the lower leg nerve damage from the bus-jeep collision of 2010 started at the knee, I might not have been able to sense right away how bad the damage was.  If I’d immediately tried to stand up, I could have made it worse if it had been broken.  So I laid there for about a minute, waiting for a belated stab of pain traveling to my upper leg – which fortunately never came.  Oh, I felt it alright, just not the “Don’t move you’ve shattered the (bleep) ing thing,” sensation, which I probably would have felt in my thigh muscle, just above the knee.  So I slowly began to move.

Funny part was a lady I’ve never met calling me from the house across the road:   “Do you want my husband to come pick you up?”  Ahhh, the many ways that question could have been interpreted; and it may be the greatest pick-up line ever:  “My wife told me to come pick you up!”  Despite the pain, I tried not to start laughing at her very kind concern.  She told me that until I moved she was terrified that I was unconscious – and here I didn’t think anyone had seen it happen.  (And in her defense, she probably would have run out the door to come help – were it not for the fact that she was still in her bathrobe and bare feet.)

Bottom line:  just bruised, it appears – thank goodness.  But the bruise is bad enough, I’m still limping around going “Ow. Oooh.  Ow.  Oooh.”  Ice pack did help.

I spent yet another snow day listening to the sounds of Juno outside the window.  Most of New England had the day off; there were no trains or busses running, so I couldn’t get to the office even if I wanted to.  It was still dark outside, so I couldn’t really see how much snow had happened overnight; I could hear the wind, though.  Nibbled on a 3-day old cream biscuit; finally got the chance to try out this Pumpkin Spice coffee I bought a while ago.  I knew I needed to get some chores done; couldn’t quite motivate myself enough to do them.

The night of Juno’s arrival was another one of those MBTA nightmares.  The MBTA bridge before Beverly had gotten stuck open by a boat crashing into it.  We caught the 4:20 to Newburyport alright, jam-packed full of people trying to get home before the big storm hit.  First we stopped and sat at every single station, starting with Lynn.  No announcements, no explanations – just lengthy idling.  An hour passes; people are getting irritated at not being told anything and the irate tweeting starts, some of which are pretty funny.  At about the two-hour mark, we creep into Salem.  Now they make an announcement:  bridge is stuck, yada yada, we’re going to bus you over the water to Beverly, where trains are waiting to take you the rest of the way.  Okay good, okay fine.  (with a respectful nod to the infamous Mouse of Ron Perlman/Linda Hamilton’s Beauty and the Beast who always said that.) 

We all get off the train and over to the Salem roundabout where the busses were supposed to be waiting in the sleet, snow and wind.  Within minutes we’re all shivering.  No busses.  Maybe 200-300 people waiting already.  People even got off of later trains behind us and joined the crowd.

Seems the busses are all stuck in traffic gridlock (welcome to Salem!  Again.)  After about 45 minutes of us standing in the sleet, snow and wind, freezing, they finally straggle in.  NO effort at crowd control.  One guy literally shoved his way past people into a bus, dragging a suitcase that took up enough room for two people behind him.  The people he’d shoved out of the way to do that are now even angrier, and they have the support of the crowd.  As ugly as that incident was, the MBTA now wakes up to the fact that crowd control might be a good idea, but it’s much too little too late.

Eventually, I get on a bus.  Recall that the last announcement they made was “trains will be waiting on the other side to take you to your destination”?  Again, they lied.  Now they tell us that the “Newburyport train wasn’t in Beverly, only the Rockport one”, so they don’t know what to do with us.  We get to Beverly, all get off the bus into the freezing sleet yada yada yada, and stand there.  10 minutes later, they tell us to get back on the bus.  Now, they’re going to bus us to our stations.

After leaving the office at 3:30, it’s now closing on 8:30 at night.  The storm – which had been tame at the time I would have originally arrived at Newburyport – was now blowing snow sideways.  The temperature has gone even further down.  I am so cold my teeth are chattering.  I get home at 9:00 pm.  On the night of what they’re claiming to be an “unprecedented” storm (although, I have to say, I’ve heard worse in terms of winds), that was the MBTA’s idea of customer service.

I can see the bridge mishap being an unexpected event, sure.  But the crossed signals, absence of information, misinformation, lack of crowd control – all of that which followed I do hold them accountable for.  Absolute dead silence for the most part.

So here comes Marcus.  Can’t remember which storms were given “K” and “L” names – I think the “L” was “Linus”?  We’re now midway through the alphabet.  Marcus.  Named after the Greek god Mars.  Marcus will be on top of us for 3 days.  This is just Day One.  I’m hearing the wind start to pick up, and we’re not even into Monday yet, when the worst of it is supposed to hit.  Another 2 feet, more or less.  I’m eyeing the snow shovel, propped up against the front door, ready to be reactivated into service for the umpteenth time.

Snow.  More snow.  Snow on top of snow.  I just bought the home last April, so had not invested in a snow blower, because I had not anticipated the record-shattering winter that would find us all breaking snow accumulation records.  We get hit with a monster snowstorm, we barely dig our way out of that one and another one hits.  And another.  And another.  I don’t recall ever seeing a winter like this.  You’ve never seen so many people praying for Spring to arrive, because they can’t endure Winter anymore.  Never-ending snow shoveling.  Useless public transportation.  Stupid drivers.  Mountains of snow so high you can’t see past them.

Spring.  I am so looking forward to Spring.  After all these years, I am finally going to see The Cowsills.  They must be trending now or something; I’ve never seen so many concerts cropping up all over the place.

A trip to New York City in April.  A trip to Rhode Island in May.  And then ... the most amazing thing:  after I was considering myself the most fortunate person in the universe to be seeing them twice in two months, an announcement:  The Cowsills were going to be performing at the Hampton Beach Casino in June.  Five minutes away from me. 

I went through the ceiling with delirium, seeing that announcement.  You have no idea how much I loved and adored this band when I was young and how excited I am to be finally seeing them live.  Unfortunately as part of the “Happy Together Tour”, so not just them.  I forget who else is packaged in with them (and with all due apologies to people who I’m sure are very nice and quite talented – I’m sorry, don’t care a whit), all I saw was:  The Cowsills were going to be literally 5 minutes away from me.  Sat there in ecstatic shock for maybe 2/10’s of a second before hitting the Ticketmaster button.  Got first row.  Could not believe my good fortune.

So because I’m an obsessive sort, I took a shopping detour and drove up to Hampton Beach, to see where the place was, what the parking situation was ... discovered it’s as bad as Salem with its one-car-width-only narrow one-way streets – no wonder the traffic is jammed for miles.  Drove past the Casino Ballroom, then drove around back to check out the parking situation.  Here’s an aerial view.  Notice the parking lot in the rear?

20-feet of snow.  Apparently, since the place is closed for the winter, they had decided to pile all of the snow they couldn’t put anywhere else in the Casino Ballroom’s unused parking lot.  At least 20-feet high, probably higher.  So high you couldn’t even see the back of the building from the street.  It occurred to me, as I gaped at that mountain of snow in front of me, that remnants of that snow are still going to be there in June, no joking.

And check out that water slide!  (Blue curlicue contraption on the right side of the photo).  Looks like fun!

No way in hell I’m getting in and out of there around show time.  Found a few small hotel/motel places with heated swimming pools that looked promising.

Remind me to never – EVER – move again.  It has taken me forever to find even the simplest of things – and I never did find the foot pedal to the sewing machine – had to buy a new one.  Next, I couldn’t find the ¼” seam presser foot; then I couldn’t find the manual to re-set the tension.  Couldn’t find the materials to make templates and had to use old file folders; couldn’t find the right color of thread ... every time I blinked there was something I had packed somewhere remote and irretrievable.

Got videoed for an e-learning course.  I’m wondering if I can get a copy of it.

Back briefly to Bob Cowsill, who I once scotch-taped all over my walls ... obviously much time has passed since those days, and he’s now older and the patriarch of the entire family.  The one thing I never really paid much attention to back then was just how talented he was.  I was (obviously) paying much more attention to the things any young girl pays attention to, when she’s drowning in her first crush of young adulthood, i.e. “He is the most beautiful, gorgeous and soul-stirring hunk who has ever existed since the dawn of recorded time ... yada yada yada,” and less on, “Wow, this guy is an awesome musician.”

So this particularly fascinating video – done quite recently for a series on songs and singers – was an in-depth interview he did on the creation of their mega-hit, “Hair.”  When he’s talking about “we” doing this or that, he’s talking about four people:  Bill, his older brother, and then Barry and John, who were considerably younger when the song was recorded.  Basically:  four teenagers let loose in a recording studio, all by themselves.  They were only supposed to cut a demo of the song “Hair” from the Broadway musical they could lip-synch to on a Carl Reiner comedy variety special.  Nothing more.  Easy enough, right?

Instead, those four teenage boys recorded, produced and delivered a song (Bill and Bob at the controls) that was a global hit and is still played even today.  Point being:  I’m now finally realizing what awesome musicians those four teenage boys were.   No wonder I adored them.  And still do.

The End of the (*Bleep!*) Me Shoes Era

Before I had my lovely accident and lost sensation and fine motor control in my lower legs and feet  ... I used to be able to, when I felt like dressing up and behaving badly, wear what I now fondly refer to as my (*Bleep!*) Me Shoes ... you know the shoe:  really high stiletto heels.  AFTER the accident, I tried them once and lost my balance in them – I no longer had the sensation (translation:  fine motor skills require the ability to sense variations in the ground) in my lower legs and feet to achieve the necessary balance for them.  I expected things to improve – or at least, that’s what the surgeon told me – so I put them away for later.

5 years later ... I figured:  hey, I’ve been strengthening my legs and feet by running underwater and doing aerobics, maybe I can wear them again.  Put them on ... and had to hold onto a counter walking gingerly down the length of my house.  A woman just knows when her own (*Bleep!*) Me Shoes era comes to a wobbly close ... I just muttered “damn!” ... do I put them away again and hope for an improvement?  Or do I give up the thought of ever wearing high heels again?

[Comment from the assembled masses:  “Hey, here’s an idea, dummy:  why don’t you start out with lower heels and work your way back up to  (*Bleep!*) Me Shoes, instead of aiming for the sex appeal summit right off the bat?”]

[Blink]  Okay, fine.  Reasonable idea.  (*sigh*)

Anyway, I’m on vacation this week of Thanksgiving.  I am finally – finally! – getting my sewing/textile arts area set up ... everything had been in plastic bins and is now being moved onto shelves.  Some of the fabric is still in bins in my storage room, so sometime today or this week, I’m going to retrieve the rest of it.  THEN (hopefully) I can talk Dana into helping me move the remainder of my stuff from my North Andover storage room into this one.  Ah, life is so complicated sometimes.

Weirdest thing:  I come home last Thursday night and there’s a notice on my door.  I don’t have the notice anymore, but, basically, it went:  “WARNING!  DANGER!  The Chief of Police is holding a meeting about the dangerous standoff of a few days ago!  It is IMPERATIVE that you be there!”  The meeting was to be held on Friday at 3 in the afternoon, while I was still at work.

My first reaction:  “Huh?  WHAT standoff of a few days ago?”  I had to go look it up in the online local news.  Apparently, some guy had barricaded himself in his home two streets in our subdivision away from me, threatening to kill himself and take us all with him.  No mention of how he planned to do that.  The local SWAT team (who knew a town this small had one?) was called in; the standoff lasted 10 hours, after which he surrendered and was carted off to jail.  He actually didn’t own the home he was barricaded in; his father did, so technically he’s not even a resident.  He also wasn’t allowed to own firearms, so the fact that he did was a bit of an issue, as far as the police were concerned.

I still couldn’t figure out what danger I was still supposedly in, so I called the police to ask.  They weren’t aware of the notice written by our Homeowner’s Association and posted on my door, and when I read it to them, they kinda went, “Sheesh.”  So apparently the Homeowner’s Association had gotten a little carried away with the imminent danger side of it.  I said, “You arrested him and he’s in jail, right?” 

Them:      Yup.  He won’t be out for a long time.
Me:      So there’s nothing I need to worry about?
Them:      Nope.
Me:      OK. I’m good.  Thanks.

 – and tossed the IMPERATIVE MEETING YOUR LIFE IS AT STAKE! notice in the trash in a state of complete agreement:  sheesh.

Note to self:  the Homeowner’s Association seems to be full of over-reactive hysterics.  I never did ask the police how he planned to “take all of us with him”, and assume he was just blustering.

Bottom line:  fortunately for me, and unfortunately for all of you slogging through this blog, I’m still here.

Finally have my  new permanent tooth. I don’t think I ever mentioned my front tooth.  Picture it:  winter, 2014.  Temperature:  something like 10 degrees below zero.  I’m shivering on the Andover commuter rail platform, waiting for the train.  I make the fatal mistake of breathing.

I heard this loud “KERRACK!” and suddenly feel something hard on my tongue.  I spit it out and look at it.  Half a tooth!  My front tooth had, in the bitter cold, cracked right in half!

Since then, I had to have the missing part of the tooth slathered in with whatever material they use to make new teeth.  That got me through a few days.  Then I had to have the remaining part of the tooth extracted, and was given a “flipper” – looked like a retainer, except it had a fake tooth on it which was created based on the remaining half of my front tooth so it looked like the original, and I had to take it out to eat, which was really annoying. 

But even worse, the sides of that “flipper” kept scraping away at other teeth and my tongue, and I hated the thing.  Extremely painful, most of the time.  A month or so ago (I had to wait until I could afford the balance of the procedure), I was given a temporary tooth, which was screwed into the bone, and I could finally get rid of the annoying flipper.  Then I returned for the permanent front tooth to be put in.  Finally!!

So – moving on – yesterday I pulled together my first-ever formal circle casting, quarters calling, deities invoking and spell casting ritual ... which is the ultimate goal for this year’s class, but you need to get started working on it from the beginning.  They always tell you never to share the spell itself with anyone else, so I won’t, but I can share a few funny and not-so-funny lessons learned: 

First:  move the coffee-table/slash/altar away from the couch BEFORE doing anything – I barked my shins on that thing more times than I can count.

Second:  while I thought I had done a run-through in my head for logistics purposes, it appears I had missed a few things.  I had ground the incense in my mortar ahead of time, and had the cast iron censor/slash/miniature cauldron ready, but forgot the long matches to light the charcoal at the bottom of it.  Had to open a door, failed to find the matches, ended up grabbing a set of tongs and using those.

Third:  test things first.  Used a gorgeous seashell as a water container, only to discover the shell had a hole in it.  Ended up having to quickly shove a paper towel under the cloth so that I wouldn’t get a water mark.  Luckily, I hadn’t cast the circle yet when that happened.

Fourth:  hadn’t caught all of the “ye”s, “thou”s and other Old English variants in the invocation and had to improvise on the fly.  I need to make sure the spoken words are words I can speak in my own voice.  And I don’t speak using “thee”s, “thou”s and “ye old”s.  It isn’t me speaking, if I start tossing out words like that, it’s somebody else.  As for the wonderful beings I directed my invocation to, trust me, they understand me quite well without all the Old English.

Fifth:  that blue circle really does generate a lot of energy.  Almost feels electric, as though it should be buzzing.  It was a lovely sensation, actually feeling the energy.

Sixth:  didn’t know that directions had different invoking and banishing symbols, so I should have printed out a diagram to refer to, at least until I have memorized them.

Seventh:  I don’t know how this will work out when I have to do this in class, because my correspondences are so different.  SO many people place water in the west and air in the east, which would work beautifully if I lived in California – but I don’t.  For me, water is in the east, because I can walk out my door, head east, and there’s the Atlantic Ocean.  The traditions that Americans use are typically Celtic or British – where water IS in the west.  The correspondences have to be entirely different for people in Australia and New Zealand.

Eighth:  bring tissues!!!  Again, won’t mention the spell, but when I was with the deities who took me under their sphere of protection and guidance when I was initiated, I ended up with tears running down my face – which can happen with you’re facing the God of Spoken Truth (Thoth) who catches every prevarication you might attempt ... not that I tried.  Point is:  complete self-honesty can be painful sometimes.  Ergo, the tears.  Unfortunately, I had nothing to mop them up with but a sleeve.

Ninth:  you might want to preview the musical accompaniment BEFORE everything starts.  I had downloaded what I thought was meditation music and missed the actually quite catchy and upbeat (also raucous and filled with laughter) tribute to Loki, right in the middle of it.  Now, under normal circumstances, I would have gotten a kick out of the song, because after watching Tom Hiddleston play Loki in the Marvel films (and doing one heck of a memorable job of it), I would have sung along with it.  However ... the juxtaposition was a bit distracting, coming as it did right in the midst of the rite.

Just opened the door to retrieve the last of the groceries:  OH NO!!!   SNOW!!!!