Blizzard of 1993

We're a month shy of the fifteenth anniversary of the Blizzard of '93, which still stands as the biggest blizzard I've personally ever been through. I was still in grad school at Vajenyatek in Blacksburg when the storm hit and I wound up spending at least one night sleeping on the floor of my office and drinking bottle after bottle of Cappio bottled cappuccino and eating Cheetos because that's what I had squirreled away in my cabinet. By the time the storm finished, we had something like five feet of snow pushed up against the doors of my building.

My father, a professor at Tech, decided "I Must Clear The Driveway". His half-mile-long, steep, unpaved gravelled driveway. With only his blade-equipped pickup truck. And, like a lot of idiots, he wound up having a heart attack. Some guys had to be fetched out from their houses using front-end loaders and whatever heavy equipment could make it through the snow.

Mom called me at my apartment when the storm was just really socking in to tell me Dad was in the hospital, having had his heart attack, and told me under no circumstances was I to try to walk to the hospital to check up on him. Before she said that part, it hadn't even occurred to me to walk six miles through total whiteout conditions all the way to the hospital. Afterwards...

Well, I was picked up by the police and labeled "a total fscking idiot" about a half mile away from the hospital. They gave me a ride the rest of the way and my father, who was resting comfortably, just about had another heart attack when he saw me come in, dressed in my heaviest coat and swaddled in scarf after scarf. After a while they told me was fine, needed to rest, and made me leave, but at least the cops gave me a ride to campus and I rode out the rest of the storm in my office. Drinking endless bottles of cappuccino and gibbering like an idiot.

Good times, good times.

Joe Stalin

The hospital I'm working this month decided to decorate a long, otherwise empty hallway leading down to the newborn wing with a lot of black-and-white pages from Look magazine, circa World War II, specifically from those issues that happened to mention their community.

You know the drill: "On the Homefront in ______, New York" with photos showing how the folks in the Adirondacks were coping with wartime privations and so on and collecting scrap metal and so on and so on and so on. Just for thoroughness's sake, they posted the covers to each issue as well.

Here's the disconcerting thing:



It's just sort of ... odd ... walking from my training room down to the coffee shop each day and walking right by a big colorful picture of Joseph Stalin. On the hallway past the 'Snuggery', to boot.