animals

I’m not sure there’s any sane world in which it could have snowed again last night, a good twenty-four inches on top of everything we’ve already had, much less one in which my office would still be open for the day. But that, apparently, is the world I live in, because that’s exactly how it happened. It snowed all night, enough to make the commute a slippery slog, but not enough, apparently, for the powers that be to shut my office down. (I’m not sure that said powers were in the office themselves, of course, but that’s another story.)

The Long Island Railroad had not shoveled at my station at all this morning, and when I saw the state of it, I knew I had to be crazy not to turn around and take a vacation day. My father, who is apparently just that much crazier than me, had been up at 5 a.m., using the snow-blower to clear a path down the driveway. I didn’t realize this is what he was doing until about 6 a.m., when, still only half-awake, I spied him from my bedroom window, nearly finished. If he hadn’t done that much, my mother, whose employer did close, joked that she would still be shoveling. If he hadn’t done that, I probably would have stayed home.

I tell you, the LIRR could have used him this morning. They were only just getting started clearing the platforms when I got home around 5:30 tonight. Which is a nice way to not at all beat the peak hours, while also extending a hearty “screw you” to everyone else. Lots of other stations along the way — and believe me, this morning my train was making all local stops — were cleared, but I guess ours didn’t rate. I guess ours, unlike the next one on the line, didn’t have a CBS news crew filming the morning commute, no doubt to see if the railroad botched this big snowfall like they did the one after Christmas.

It was almost pretty in Manhattan, with the snow clinging to the trees, but that was only if you ignored the fact that there was almost nowhere to walk. Shovels and plows had been pretty hit or miss, it looked like, and crossing streets became an exercise in single-file, slushy danger. When I arrived at the office, making surprisingly good time despite the slow going of first the train and then my feet, it was a little anticlimactic. Oh sure, there was that brief moment of panic and aggravation when I found the fourth floor reception door was locked, and I wondered if they’d decided to close the office after all. But I went downstairs to the third floor and used our internal staircase to walk up. And by mid-morning, almost everyone had made it in.

This evening, as I said, the LIRR had finally started clearing the snow from my station’s platform. Though they had still not cleared a lot of it, where I needed to walk, at least, you finally could. The same couldn’t be said of all the sidewalks between there and home, of course — like in Manhattan, a lot of places had shoveled just the bare minimum, maybe a path from parking lot to door. But I made it home in one piece, safe and sound. And today I was wearing my boots, so I didn’t come close — well, as close — to slipping, like I almost did yesterday.

We had one last interesting thing happen this evening, shortly after I got home. A small dog, sans collar or tags, was lost on the street. We could neither coax her in, out of the icy, snow-clogged street, nor figure out where she had come from. We couldn’t even tell for sure that she was a she. She kept barking, running away, running back. My mother went door to door, to our likeliest neighbors — people who might either have a dog or know whose she was — and a few people, my father and I included, tried to get her to follow us. Since that, at least, seemed like something to do, rather than stand around in the cold worrying about her getting hit by a car or freezing to death. (All of this, of course, while dinner was cooking in the oven.) Luckily, someone eventually came for the dog, coaxed her into a car with a leash, and took her home.

So at least the day has a happy ending.

Although, seriously, it feels like it ought to be Friday already.