The Blizzard Ate Him

Note: A site with pictures (so you can see all the pretty snow-buried cars) can be found here: http://www.erh.noaa.gov/er/buf/blizzard/blizphoto.html

Summary: A humorous true story about my sister (who was one year's old), a really awful blizzard, and a guy who would rather face a driving ban than stay in the same house. This was written for my English class.

My mom has about 50 stories about all the crazy things my brother did when he was younger. For example, his wild leap into the mall fountain while dressed for winter. And in Buffalo, winter weather means that by October you're waddling around dressed like an Eskimo. Let me put it this way, it was mid January and by that time of year we make Eskimos look under-dressed out of sheer necessity. Okay, maybe I exaggerated just a teensy-weensy bit.

It wasn't just what happened that makes my mom shake her head when she tells that story. It was the sheer speed in which it happened. One minute she is turning around to pay for an item. The next minute he's through the door and into the fountain and splashing around like it's Summer at the beach. The little old ladies thanked my mom for the best laugh in many a year. The only thing on my mother's mind was the fact that she had to cart a soaking wet kid (snowsuit and all) across a massive parking lot and into the car without the poor kid losing half his extremeties to frostbite.

Of course there was also the time he drove the car through the garage. Now, when she says through the garage the first thing people think is that he just knocked a hole through the side of it, or soemthing like that. They don't think that 'through the garage' means 'through the garage'. Because he did indeed drive through the garage, smashed through a pool table, and ended up on the grass on the other side. He crawled out through the back window and the first thing out of his mouth was 'don't tell dad, don't tell dad..." This is funny because it's usually mom us kids worry about. Oops, did I just tell you that?

Besides which my dad does not tell these sorts of stories. Of sure, he's a funny guy my dad. By funny I mean, tries to be funny and tells bad jokes. You probably have at least one person in your family like that. I have two, my grandfather and my father, both of whom share a good deal of genetic material. They also share the fact that they have no tastebuds. This is a necessity if you want to grow up on my grandmother's cooking.

Let me tell you, that woman cannot cook to save her life. In Kindergarden all the other kids had at least one person in the family who could cook really well, and their siblings were not it. It was always their father, mother, grandmother, aunt, etc. I have two people in my entire extended family who can cook; my brother and sister. In my entire extended family, those are the only two I know of. And I've tasted the culinary exploits of most of my family. No matter how dull, how poorly made, how burnt or stale, nothing could be as bad as my grandmother's cooking.

She can't even reheat a piece of chicken. She ruined an entire batch of prefectly good chicken wings someone had made. Sacrilige! No dear grandma, dumping barbeque sauce on pre-made chicken and nuking it into the oven til it's drier then a mummy from an ancient pyramid is not cooking. It is not reheating. I don't even know what to call it.

And have you heard the joke about the blackened/'black' cherry pie? Probably not, because it's a family in-joke. No, cherry pies are not supposed to be full of crunchy carbonized black filling.

And any good cook worth it's weight in salt knows that subsititions do not mean 'if it looks the same color, it is the same'. And any good baker would certainly not assume that mayoinnaise is a suitable replacement in cheesecake. And any half-way decent would be chef knows that you don't stare at the finished product wondering why in the name of George Washington's Sacred Long Johns is the thing runny? If she wasn't such a wonderfully hard working and sweet woman, no one would eat her cooking at all. As it is we are forced to chow down, and pretend that we like it.

My mom thinks I am hilarious, and wise. She is right about the hilarious part, but it's all unintentional. Small children do indeed say the darndest things. Between the two of us, that is to say my brother and I, we managed to make her laugh almost as many times as my brother ended up in the E.R. Yes, we two were a parents worst nightmare. My brother with his obvious love for spending time in the E.R. and my unsatiable curiosity and disregard for social propriety, we managed to wreck havoc throughout our lives.

My brother, with his pyromaniac like tendencies was the worst. He was also a magnet for accidents. A bad combination, and yet fire never caused any problems. with him. It seemed that despite his insanity, his misadventures never severely injured him. When he hit a baseball into a hornet's nest he was covered in the things and stung repeatedly. It took several terse minutes or pulling off the hornets (he was so covered in them he looked like a black ball) before the family realized that my aunt was allergic to stings, my father's arm was swelling up like a balloon, and my brother was unharmed.

When he lit the fireplace when he was a small child, he did it without help. He had climbed up on top of the fridge to get down the matches, and was sitting placidly by the time my parents awoke. When he blew up a newspaper box with a home-made firecracker he was unscathed, although the owners of the box were furious. And it's funny because his love of fire made him great at fighting them. He went to college to learn to be a fire protection engineer, and works hard at his job today.

And did I ever tell you that when he was three he rode out on his tricycle to a shopping center because he wanted to help his father shop? He rode across a bridge, through a major intersection, and was tricycling around a massive lot all by himself before my parents realized that he had escaped his crib and snuck out.
I can't imagine their terror. No, it was the fairly mundane things (by comparison) that injured him. Like hwne he walked next to a propped up ladder and it fell atop him. Or when he had a bicycling accident because he rode with 'no hands' and smashed himself up. Or when he slide down a metal slide and gashed his head.

But one of us three siblings is not like the other. You see, Lori is the only one who never got into any trouble, at least never on purpose. And she wasn't a healthy child, so she did require a lot of care as she grew. But she was not an accident magnet, and she was not too curious for her own good. My brother had been causing a great deal of trouble since he was three, at least. I mean, he probably caused trouble when he was still in the womb, maybe he burped in there or something. Mom says that Lori used to hiccup, but that was pretty much it.

Lori is, and has always been, perfect. Or at least, she wanted to be perfect, and I know that caused trouble at times. But I escaped the basic sibling rivalry; I used to bug her but she helped raise me and I will always love her as not a sister for as a friend and a second mother. She really cared for me a lot, and even now she tries to look after me. Despite all this there is a little rivalry there, and I do appreciate stories about her. I mean, this is probably the only story about here that doesn't involve her winning something. Maybe that's why I take so much delight in it. She was less then a year old, so what? I take what I can get.

It all came about because in Buffalo it snows frequently, or rather it blizzards frequently. Because of the lake we get lots of snow, but the lake does have one good side and that is that it keeps the weather warmer then it could be. Unfortunately, between the vast quanities of snow and the biting winds, blizzards are something you get used to. And the visibility is almost nil. The Blizzard of '77 had a lot of snow, enough to bury cards and collapse rooftops built to last under large quanities of snow. We were used to Blizzards, us Buffalonians, and we were always ready.

We kept shovels and emergencies supplies in our trunks. We could wield scrapers and snow brushes like we were Jedi masters. Our tires, nay our entire cars, were all ready to get us through the toughest of storms. We were used to driving blind through blasts of snow that made the world look like a blank sheet of white paper. Other cities had to close school when a mere foot or two of snow came down, but not us. We'd bundle up and huddle together at the bus stop much like Emperor penguins guarding their eggs through the bitter Antarctic Winter. We were prepared, and even warm costumes on Halloween were a part of tradition.

Yes, we were all ready for another year of snow. But what hit us ground things to a halt. This is why the Blizzard of 77 is so infamous. Because it was big enough to knock us down. I don't want to even think about it about how much damage it would do in a warm climate. Lots of half-melted snow means ice, which is even more dangerous.

The following incident took place during the Blizzard of ’77. For hours snow poured down as the wind reduced visibility to nothing. My dad’s cousin Joe had the misfortune to be trapped, but he certainly wasn’t the only one. He had the fortune, or misfortune, to be stuck near our house. He called the family for help, reasoning that since we were close maybe he could reach us without dieing of hypothermia. After all, there was a countywide ban on driving.

The family eventually decided that there was no way they could dig his car out with the snow still coming down as heavy as it was. My father was apparently smart enough not to waste time on a hopeless case; plenty have died trying in lesser snowstorms. Remarkably, Joe managed to reach our house in one piece. The call seemed to be more out of politeness; he wanted to warn us first. He didn’t really have a choice in the matter, staying out would have been fatal. As it was he was probably lucky to be alive.

My sister was at that time a one year old. She was crying quite loudly as she was feeling unwell. My mother explained that at that time in her life she was almost always sick so the crying would go on throughout the day. My dad’s cousin seemed to be a bit curious about it, at any rate he didn’t think too much of it.

“Does she always do that?” he inquired.

“Yes.” was my parent’s reply.

Foolishly perhaps, he didn’t believe them. One can only ponder what his thoughts would have been had he been aware of what was in store for him. The snow continued to pour down by the truckload, and the ban had not yet been lifted.

My sister had not stopped crying for several hours, in fact she used to do it all day. Nothing helped, so my parents just lived with it after a while. Anyone who's hearing had not yet been damaged by the frequent yelling/wailing/crying would most likely be unable to handle it for very long. Joe had endured several hours, probably a record, but he was starting to get desperate.

“I think it’s clearing up now,” said Joe, suddenly and without conviction.

Later my mother would comment “You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.” Ignoring any protests otherwise, Joe dashed out into the ongoing blizzard.

Many years after that day, I met my dad’s cousin. We were at my grandparents’ house for Thanksgiving or some other celebration involving the choking down of vast quantities of my grandmother’s dry and very burnt food. The entire family was sitting at the table, and I asked him about the Blizzard.

“Oh I remember that,” he said. “I just couldn’t remember why I left when they were saying you weren’t supposed to be driving or anything.” Meanwhile, next to him his partner has a look on his

The entire family seemed to think it was worth laughing about.