A Christmas Blizzard Read Online Free PDF

lungs”—but the big thing she warned against was putting your tongue on a pump handle. Your tongue would freeze to it and there you’d be, stuck, and somebody would have to come and either warm up the handle with a blowtorch or else tear your tongue off it.
    The tongue on the pump handle. Why did this loom so large in his mind? Pump handles were a rarity. He had never heard of an actual case of pump-handle-tongue freezing. Years later, after Daddy died, when Mother was opening up a little, he had asked her, “Why did you make such a big thing about not putting our tongues on pump handles?” and Mother said she had no idea what he was talking about and he said, “You warned me against putting my tongue on a pump handle because it would freeze to it and it’s become a very big thing in my life.” And his sister Elaine said he was being stupid. “Mother always was worried about you because you were sickly and difficult and didn’t get along with other children,” she said. “Someday they would have programs for special-needs kids like you but they didn’t then. There was only your mom. And now you blame her for your weirdness?”
    But the pump-handle obsession was stuck up there in his head. A sense of doom, a feeling that, one cold winter day, he would walk along and see a pump handle and be caught in its force field and stick his tongue to it and suffer horrible pain and his tongue would never recover. He would talk with a lisp afterward. No amount of speech therapy would help. And that was the basis of his horror of Christmas: the painful memory of a childhood fear that only grew stronger with the years. A fear of pump handles and also iron railings, iron poles, chains, clasps, shafts, masts, cast-iron pillars, pilasters, parapets, pipes, pegs, pins, pans, plates, panels, pommels, planks, pivots—once in a science museum in Poughkeepsie he stood enthralled by a pendulum, his tongue extended—knobs, rings, ribs, hoops, chucks, bolts, shells, spikes, sockets, shanks, tanks, trays, discs, hinges, hoods, hubcaps, gussets, cages, coils, cleats, caps, cups, couplings, capstans and davits, ductwork, trusses, bumpers, brackets, ratchets, switches, swivels, handles, spindles and sprockets, rockers, spacers, spools, screws, skirts, strips, stirrups, springs, manifolds—once, boarding a small plane in Pittsburgh he had felt powerfully drawn toward the propeller—hammers, housings, levers, louvers, vents, valves, bearings, beams, blades, clamps—once in Pomona he was photographed looking at an iron plinth and his tongue was hanging out. To strangers James was a big-shot and a tycoon and a handy target of abuse, but in fact he was a human being suffering from an obsession with iron and freezing weather and his tongue, clearly from a need for self-abasement and humiliation. Someday his dirty little secret would come out into the open . . .
    CHI-TOWN TYCOON RESCUED BY FIREMEN,
TONGUE FROZEN TO PUMP HANDLE;
AT HOSPITAL, RECEIPTS FOUND IN POCKET
LEAD TO CHARGE OF 14 COUNTS OF FRAUD;
IF GUILTY, COULD FACE 150 YEARS IN JAIL
    It was coming. If not this year, then next.
    His only hope of escape?
    Hawaii. It does not freeze in Hawaii. Not like you’d notice it.

6. The intractable problem of pump handles
     
     
    H e had tried yoga and the teacher Julie Ramanandra thought a position called the Blissful Rutabaga might be helpful. “Place the top of your head flat against the floor between your feet and then raise your legs very very high and straight in the air, keeping your hands in your pockets,” she said. As she did this very thing. He got up and bowed and left the room.
    A behavioral psychologist named Smucker told him to tie bells around his ankles so they jingled when he walked and to sing a calypso number, “Mon, I Go To De Market Now An’ Mak Much Mazuma.” He said, “If you act happy, you will become happy. It actually works.” James thanked him for the idea.
    He went to an ill-tempered psychiatrist named