Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Hey. There are 60 inches of snow already on the ground in Lancaster, New York, near Buffalo.




There is a photograph of my own self in about the same predicament that gent is in. I lived in Boston during the "Blizzard of '78." I see on Wikipedia that "only" 27 inches of snow fell in Boston during that storm. I don't know where the heck they measured that but in Somerville where I lived...Well, I got the pic, man, there were more than 27 damn inches in Somerville.

That was the only time in my life I ever got a little concerned during a snow storm. It seemed to go on for days, not a blizzard with the wind blowing crazy, just steady coming down and steady piling up. I got concerned because the stores were running out of food. I remember walking to a store, I think it was a CVS, to get some milk, and the shelves were pretty bare. You couldn't drive, you couldn't get your car out, so if the local store ran out of food, you were in deep doo-doo.

I remember--this is an absolutely true story--walking to the store and tripping over something, like a boulder or something, and looking down and it was the top of a parking meter. Of course schools were closed and I remember being told that the last time Harvard shut down was during the War of 1812. I was going to MIT at the time but it happened that my first class back was at Harvard and I remember the professor was flustered. Normally, you'd just ignore a "totally contingent event," as he put it, like a snowstorm but that storm flustered him. Flustered everybody. Never been in anything like that.