Freeze

Paralysis where once there was laughter, wildness of imagination, the ability to, if only for a brief moment, experience perfection.  It’s where we are as a nation, where we huddle as a people, where we go when our daily habits are in the slightest bit challenged – psychic panic rooms.  Looking out into my backyard, the snow continues to fall gently, accentuating the silence that come over the town, the schools, the work place, the roads out.  Accumulation hardly worth going out and shoveling, and yet for the past two days Connecticut and the eastern seaboard has been repeatedly put on alert of an impending snow storm that lacks any real sense of storm.  I can understand our brethren to our south in Virginia panicking as they lack muscle memory when it comes to snow storms, but this is the Northern Kingdom, New England for crying out loud.

I remember 1978 in NYC, before Doppler radar, before disconnected cable conglomerates fed us endless images of far off destruction and mayhem in full motion color – be they weather or criminally related, a time after the stations all went dead in the deep of night and just as the national anthem finished its last bar.  I remember the blizzard that sacked the city that year, accumulation measured in feet, schools closed naturally, my father already gone off to work, the trail he blazed down the steps and onto the street which became a pedestrian fast track all that remained of him by the time I got up and heard Radio WADO tell of the blizzard and the endless delays.  Delays for sure, but full stoppage, panic and hoarding?  Nothing stopped on the block.  No sooner had I finished with breakfast than Mike was ringing my bell, Alex the Greek standing behind him, somehow having found a large cardboard box that was to be our urban toboggan for the morning run down Suicide Hill.

The paper reports (internet version, where the buffet of local, national, global chaos is all served on the front page, all at once for us to gorge on) a series of deadly accidents that occur, that take life because passenger and drivers don’t wear seat belts, cyclist that lay brain dead because the failed to wear a helmet, children that are buried because they contracted the latest flu concoction or were disappeared by seemingly ever present armies of zombie child snatchers.  I’m sure all of this happened in 1978, I’m sure it’s always happened, but I don’t recall the attribution of death being placed on a lack of safety equipment, lack of inoculation, lack of alertness to changing weather patterns that prevented people from stockpiling more milk than they could finish in a month, lack of parents obsessively managing every moment of every waking day in their child’s life.  In 1978, Lugo’s corner bodega opened a little late, but it opened, and it opened because Mike, Alex the Greek, Will el Chino, and I all helped Mr. Lugo dig out his entrance and sidewalk using nothing more than trashcan lids for which we received a thank you can of Coke and several Twinkies (I’ve since read the Twinkie alert and no longer feel safe eating one, let alone allowing my daughter to even imagine such a concoction of every known chemical on the periodic chart, but damn did they taste good).

I’ve been thinking of Haiti lately, thinking of the time I spent there traveling with my brother and a Haitian friend back in 1998, they in search of photographic grit in the outlands where Vodun still ruled, I in search of Carpentier’s maravilloso.  I’ve been thinking of Haiti, feeling for her, and wondering about resiliency and how the Haitian people have tremendous reserves of it that have allowed them to live, love, and die with dignity for more than 500 years.  Nothing in my travels through the developing world prepared me for Haiti back in 1998, a complete collapse into a world that survives on spirit and an absolute sense of love that is alien to the western mindset, and watching the images of the dead, of the city of cemeteries that has always been Port-Au-Prince, I can’t help but feel a strange sense of nausea and disgust for the over caution that has eroded our overdeveloped sense of what it means to be alive, to be free and feel the burn of hunger, the anxiety of an ever evolving and never predictable reality that has no patience for sentimentality or the comfort of hesitation and over consumption.

Snow continues to fall quietly and I’m reminded of Frost, the silence of the woods calling, but I resist and instead call my daughter, future X Games star who asks with all the wonder of flight in her eyes if we can build a halfpipe.