December 20, 2009
Sunday

We woke this morning to a final accumulation of a little more than 7 inches of snow, as measured, once again, by opening the sliding glass door in the kitchen, reaching out with my Dominic Costanza yardstick, plunging it into the snow, and eyeballing how far it gets buried.

Although yesterday seemed like an endless storm, today offered crisp air and sunny skies. I put on my heavy traction-soled fur-lined lace-up winter boots to go out for the paper, but I only had to take a few steps out onto the driveway, enough to feel that the snow was of the dry, fluffy variety. My neighbor was out in her driveway, supervising her dog, who looked like a stag leaping through the unbroken expanse of the back yard. She brought my paper up from the bottom of the driveway, we exchanged pleasantries, and then each retreated through her own garage and brought the door down behind her.

All of the boys who used to do our driveways have graduated and gone away. Through most of the morning I could hear snow blowers here and there, but no enterprising young men with shovels came to the door. That was okay, because we contract with our lawn service to take care of deep snow like this. They get here as promptly as they can, but because of our distance from their garage, I knew we wouldn’t be out until late in the afternoon.

That was okay, too, because I really didn’t have anyplace to go, except church. Ron’s choir director cancelled their duties for the 9:00 Mass at his church. The congregation would have to sing “blizzard music” (simple hymns that everybody knows). I knew my church was proceeding with services, and I was sorry to miss the Fourth Sunday in Advent, especially since I whined last week that we hadn’t yet sung Veni, Veni, Emmanuel. I sang it quietly to myself with my C&C (Coffee and Contemplation) before the sun came up.

I grew up in a Catholic family where attendance at Mass on Sunday was assumed. Until I was fifteen we lived two blocks from the church and often walked, especially in good weather. When I was in high school we moved to a suburban neighborhood that was about three miles from the church of that parish. Portions of the walk, should we ever have undertaken it, would have been along the shoulders of a divided highway. So we always drove to Mass. I know we had snowy weather — I know we had snow days! — yet I do not remember there ever being a Sunday we did not go to Mass.

I remember a Sunday, about this time of year, in 1964, when I was seventeen. We had been to Mass early because we — my parents, my sister, and I — were going to my father’s sister’s house, about a hundred miles away, for a holiday get together with her family. I remember that there was snow on the ground, maybe a lot of it, and for some reason, after church, we parked not in our driveway, which had something of a steep pitch up from the street, but on the flat cul-de-sac across the way.

When we came home from Mass we had something to eat, a light meal to tide us over before the feast at Aunt Florence’s. We gathered up the packages were were taking, trudged over to our car, and prepared to leave.

And the car would not start.

We had only one car, a 1961 white Chevy Bel Air (similar to the Impala pictured, without the turquoise accent), the car I’d learned to drive on. Ignition systems and all the other mechanical voodoo that makes cars go were touchier and trickier then than they are now, especially in cold weather. The engine was cranking, coughing a bit, sputtering, but it would not catch, would not turn over, would not go from a throat-clearing guffaw to a hum or a purr.

We got out and went back into the house. I can still see my father standing at the counter in the kitchen, the cord from the wall telephone reaching across the doorway into the dining room. He is paging through the phone book. I am sitting on the couch in the living room. He is calling garages.

He explained the situation, asked if someone could come out and look at the car, maybe make some adjustment so it will start, “because we’d like to get to church.”

We’ve been to church, I thought. He’s saying that so the garageman will have more sympathy, so he’ll think we have to get to church to save our souls, not go gallivanting off to drink wine and eat pork roast and exchange gifts.

I think he talked to three garages, repeating the “We’d like to get to church” line each time. I think he sort of mumbled it the last time, as if he knew it was a subterfuge that anyone could see through.

At length, a mechanic did come, and the car was adjusted or repaired or otherwise cajoled into behaving, and we proceeded to Clifton Heights, where the food was undoubtedly good, the presents delightful for their having been carefully chosen, the fellowship with family just what Christmas is supposed to be all about.

I don’t remember any of that. All I remember, forty-five years later, is hearing my father tell a lie because he thought it would make his need seem more urgent, more worthy of a mechanic’s time and effort on a snowy Sunday afternoon.

*************

From the Archives
December 20, 2004 — Post-Party Depression: It was 11 degrees and windy this morning when I went out for the paper just before 7:00. Dark, too, because sunrise doesn’t come these days till nearly 7:30. The people at the end of the block leave their Christmas lights on all night — strings of tiny whites that wrap the porch railing and the bushes and climb through the bare branches of the tree in their front yard. I like looking at them, at the glow that greets me when I get to the end of the driveway and scoop up my paper.

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