Frozen

When I don't blog, people really check up on me. So thanks for checking up on me, but here's my day yesterday. I go outside and it's something frightening like 12 degrees and the day before it had been warm enough to rain, so now there are big pools of solid ice all over and it's disheartening to say the least.

We'd spent Sunday feeling like Spring might be around the corner and at church, talking about Lent and thinking about Ash Wednesday and also singing "Heaven Hop" from the 1930's tapdancing musical "Anything Goes", but that's another story. (A friend in choir is trying to get me to join and was tempting me by saying we could do "Gabriel" and "Heaven Hop" from that show ... I think she was kidding.) Also I served communion and overfilled the wine glasses, a number of people mentioned that to me after the service, but net net, the day felt hopeful and spring-like and I was feeling good. And Bob Beckwith said the kindest thing to me and I could have kissed him. He looked handsome as hell in those terrific preppy Nantucket red khaki trousers on and a nice navy blue jacket. All of it was making me feel like New England could come out from under this nuclear winter.

So then Monday morning -- like the goddamned day you have to get up and go back to work, that "Monday" -- I go out and it's so freezing, it looks like a tacky movie set for some B movie about another planet called "Ice 51". And on top of it ...

I try to open the car door and it's FROZEN SOLID.

And I mean, FROZEN SHUT like they've used crazy glue to seal it. And is it too much to ask on a day when you'd much rather stay in bed and you've made all the requisite effort to get to work -- you've washed your face, you've given your kid a snack for school, you've even checked your email before leaving the house, you're wearing something you actually bothered to pay money to have drycleaned -- is it too much to ask that you might be able to OPEN THE GODDAMNED DOOR TO YOUR GODDAMNED CAR?

And how about the other doors ... now you're thinking "I really don't want to get in the back door and crawl into the front, but I will if I must."

So you go around to the other doors and THEY ARE ALL FROZEN SHUT.

And you can't even warm the car up, because you can't get IN the car. It's rough. It's just rough. I mean as a friend said the other day, that first snow storm was lovely, the second was quaint, but the last 53 I can do without.

I wonder if we're going to have some weird mass New England-ish hallucination and when it gets warm we'll all be so psychologically impaired we'll refuse to take off our winter coats -- like bag ladies and bag men on the boulevard, wandering aimlessly with heavy wool coats and sheepskin sherpa hats on, the ones with the ear flaps. Maybe we'll all lose it and never come back from this winter.

I'd like to end the story with panache and visual drama, by saying I just trotted back in my house on my high heels -- not designed for ice navigation, btw, got my acetylene torch and welding helmet and melted a hole in the door with blue and gold fire, but actually, I used a ballpoint pen to pry the door open, only needed another 20 minutes to warm up the car, and finally got to work.

So on the off chance that Blogger was iced over and I couldn't get in the logon screen because it was covered with a sheet of insidious ice, I did not attempt blogging yesterday. I just could not stand the potential disappointment.