All we’re talking about in Connecticut is the failure of the economy, how we have to cut our budgets, how I can no longer count on two graduate assistants to work on the journal I’ve edited for nearly twenty years (LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory). My co-editor, Margaret E. Mitchell at University of West Georgia, and I are scrambling to keep the publication alive despite these drastic withdrawals of support, and what does Connecticut’s governor do?
She sends all non-essential state personnel home today at 11 a.m. because it’s going to snow.
As if snow is a BIG DEAL.
It started to snow about an hour ago. Let me emphasize this point: It’s only snowing. It’s not doing anything worse. Or anything weird. We live in New England. Snow is what happens in this part of the country in the winter. There are — as of right now, anyway — no flaming swords shrieking from the sky, no clouds of frogs or insects falling from swollen purple clouds, not even any fierce lightning storms or tornados or hurricane winds — just some, um, light snow.
The Weather People said it might “become heavy at times.” Okay, but this doesn’t mean Giant Snow Rocks will rain upon us. All it means, as far as I can tell, is that maybe it’ll be one of those damp snows that makes your socks very wet very fast if your shoes aren’t waterproof — and, OK, if you’re over 70, you might want to hire a neighborhood kid or maybe a plow service to do your driveway.
My friend and the woman who agrees to clean my house every week (“You pay me to do it,” she reminds me; “Now lift your feet.”) is married to a man who manages a local supermarket. Heidi has coffee with him before coming to work, and, not surprisingly, when she came in this morning, she came laden with tales of a packed store filled with panicky customers.
“They’re all buying milk, bread, and eggs. What are they afraid of? That they’ll be stuck in the house during a storm without being able to make French toast?”
I laughed for five minutes and then Heidi and I looked up whether she was alone in her estimation of what people felt they needed during a storm. We discovered, to our mutual delight, a Web site with a French Toast Code for gauging the severity of a winter “weather event,” which is based precisely on the formulation Heidi stumbled upon this morning as she watched patrons grabbing Eggland’s Best, Silk Soymilk, and Pepperidge Farms off the shelves and out of each other’s arms.
Hey, it’s a snow day. Connecticut has the day off even though we don’t have a dime to fund our adjuncts, our grad students, or our journals.
Not that I’m bitter. I’ll just pour some more syrup on my French toast.
(Photo by Flickr user Glen Bowman)
