Let it snow

I had always thought of Chicago as a snowy place. I guess growing up you have more awareness of a snowy day. You remember going out with your sled and having snowball fights. You don’t remember all those days of cold with no snow when you sat home watching tv or whatever you did at home before tv.

What did we do before tv? I remember before tv. I remember visiting some relatives and in some basement room was some guy I thought of as one of those crazy old uncles and he was sitting in the dark watching this thing with a small round screen and I was told it was a tv, and I didn’t know what to make of that.

Then in school I remember kids talking about going home to lunch (back in the day we all went home for lunch) and coming back and talking about The Uncle Johnny Coon’s Show, and Little Rascal’s cartoons which they were watching on tvs. Then the next door neighbors got one and we used to sneak onto their front porch and watch it through the porch window.

And then we got one. It was a big deal. I do dimly remember that before this we had a radio, one of those big standup ones, in the frontroom and we used to sit around and listen to it. That seems so odd now, almost like science fiction.

And life was kind of good then, kind of simple. It was a small world, only three channels (there was an educational channel, but nobody ever watched that), and there were our kid shows like Garfield Goose before supper, and then after supper, seems like there were three hours of shows, three channels, and seven days a week, which makes 63 different shows, few enough for someone to remember each one, and I do recall carrying around the whole schedule in my head.

It was a big deal, settling in at your place on the floor or the sofa, and someone would turn the knob, and then you would have to wait a bit, and then it would come on. And then every hour when we wanted to watch a different show, somebody would have to get up from their place, physically walk to the set and manually change the channel. Oh can you imagine that? I guess that’s what made us tough huh? Unlike those obese video gamers of today.

Oh snow, seems like there was a lot of it when I was a kid, and when I was down in Champaign reading the Chicago papers it always seemed to be snowing. And, God Bless Them, when I was in Austin Texas, sitting on my balcony sipping iced lemonade to cool off a bit, I’d open the paper and there would be those gritty Chicago faces, frostbitten, squinting against the howling winds trying to drag some two ton hunk of metal out of a Grand Canyon of snow. Oh it was beautiful. There is nothing so grand as sitting somewhere sun kissed and knowing that the folks at home are being blitzed by some Calgary Cutter.

But then in 1987 when I finally ended up back here for good, I discovered there really isn’t that much snow. We are on the wrong side of the Goddamn lake. Those places on the east side of the lake get all the snow. You would think that would be good news, but I happen to like snow. Probably has something to do with the fact that I don’t drive and I live downtown so the sidewalks get cleaned off pretty quickly, but I just feel like as long as it’s going to be cold we might as well have snow.