A Christmas Blizzard Read Online Free PDF Page A

guard against it and that’s why you put up that hard exterior. It’s the sure sign of a soft heart.”
    Nice of her to think so, but not true. Not true. Christmas brought back powerful, painful memories of winter in Looseleaf, North Dakota. The little white house and the wind blowing and the ice on the windows and the side of his little fist melting the ice to make what looked like midget footprints. Tiny people walking barefoot on ice.
    It was cold in the house. The African violets died and the cactus, some ferns survived and a funereal rubber plant. Daddy believed that if you couldn’t see your breath when you talked, then the furnace was turned up too high, not that their family talked—they did not need to talk—they knew each other well enough without conversing, but they did respirate as they sat around the kitchen table under the Praying Hands plaque and ate their wieners and cheesy potatoes and clouds of steam came out of their mouths. It was like a prison camp. Any sort of playfulness or jokiness was discouraged. No reading at the table. Daddy talked. He said things like, “I don’t know how I am going to make it through this week.” And the statement sat there, a general lament at the state of things, and nobody said a word. The tyranny of complaint. It trumps everything else.
    After supper Daddy listened to Friendly Neighbors on WLT as Mother washed the dishes and James curled up with his World Almanac which he’d read so many times he knew the major exports of all nations by heart, the state capitols and every member of the U.S. Senate and the top batters in the American and National leagues, but it was a ten-year-old almanac, Daddy refused to buy a new one, and some of the batters had retired. Bedtime was early. (What else was there to do?) Mother and Daddy slept in the downstairs bedroom in a double bed with deep grooves and James and Elaine and Benny slept in the cold attic on narrow hard beds and wore woolen long underwear to bed and there was no thought of bedwetting—it simply wasn’t an option. They slept in the cold sheets and awoke with full bladders and pulled on layers of clothing—there was no lightweight thermal wear back then—you kept warm by the exertion of carrying heavy clothing: an eighty-pound child might wear thirty pounds of clothing, a little Sherpa going forth into the blizzard. It was a world of whiteness. Blazing white. It hurt your eyes. And school was never cancelled. Never. (Once you start canceling school, where do you draw the line?) So the children trudged through the blizzard to the road where the boys had made a snow fort and the girls huddled together and the boys peed in the snow as a defense against coyote and wolves and the girls crouched, shivering, whimpering, waiting for the bus to come and it was a long wait because the schoolbuses were frozen solid.
    All of those memories—the grim mornings, the bowl of Hot Ralston cereal, the giant icicles, the frozen car—came back to him every December, and he felt trapped like a man in a deep cave, gripped by solid rock, and he felt a skittery panic though he was one of the richest men in Chicago. His heart fluttered at the first snowfall. Snow fell on the terrace on the 55th floor and though hot-water pipes embedded in the decking melted it, he felt constriction in his chest and as Christmas approached, he felt a sort of quiet terror.
    It was due to a childhood trauma that he’d never told Mrs. Sparrow about. Which filled him with shame and self-loathing.
    It was the Tongue On The Pump Handle Syndrome which he had tried to describe to his current shrink Dr. Boemer but he was from California and couldn’t possibly understand.
    His mother used to warn him about frostbite— wear warm socks and mittens— and she warned him to always breathe through his nose, not his mouth, so the air would be warmed before it reached the lungs— you don’t want to frost your lungs, that was the phrase she used, “frost your