Tales From Exit 22 by Al Batt

John Keats wrote, “O aching time! O moments big as years!”

It was a day when snow and cold called in wind for backup.

I’d finished my chores and had my ear pressed to the radio in the kitchen. It was a fire drill for snow.

I listened intently to the announcer — if only I’d listened to my teachers half as well — as he talked of a blizzard on the cusp. I was so focused that I’d developed an actual attention span. Who knew that avoiding work could be so much work? I listened like a man, who had bet his life savings on a horse, listens to the track announcer. I was trying to beat the system.

I listened to the radio announcer, his voice as slick as slush, giving cancellations school by school, inching slowly closer to my educational institution. Sometimes, just for orneriness, he’d give the school closings in alphabetical order. This added to the torture. It was a fiendish thing to do to someone whose school wasn’t near the beginning of the alphabet.

My school began with the letter N. I thought it stood for knowledge, but that’s another story. Why couldn’t I go to school in Albert Lea or Alden or Austin or Adams or AAAAA?

I knew the agony of anticipation. Why didn’t the guy on the radio hurry? He didn’t care if he hurt my feelings. He was the enemy of all that was good. There were many listeners, so there was advertising galore. Why did he spend time giving the breakfast special at some restaurant I’d never been to? Who cared about a sale on snow tires? Why didn’t the school officials give us a break and call off school? What could one day hurt? Most of us knew more than what was good for us already. Were they worried that we’d have too much fun? If they called off school, we wouldn’t be able to pelt them with snowballs in retribution.

I’d have been happy to miss a day because of snow. A snow day is a found day. One minute you don’t have it and then you do. A free day. A snow day. Magical words. I spent snow days hoping for more snow.

The only thing better than a day off school because of snow was two days off because of snow. The only bad thing that could happen on a snow day was if I were already home with the flu. A snow day was a rarity, as every student was all too aware, because most serious snowfalls occurred on weekends when they did no good.

The blizzard first hit some distance from us. We were never on the leading edge of winter storms. We were never on the leading edge of anything. The storm inched nearer, the closings given on the radio moving toward my school with the speed of a glacier with a sprained ankle. The ticking of the kitchen clock became deafening. It was a photo finish as the clock and the announcer’s list of school closings raced to the wire. It was apparent that every school in the state of Minnesota had closed except for the one I attended. I could just as well have been living in Hawaii.

A watched pot never boils. If the broadcaster didn’t say “New Richland-Hartland” soon, the punctual bus driver would bring his orange conveyance to the end of our driveway. Then it’d be too late.

There were those dark days, when we students, the condemned, with all the gravity of pallbearers, squirmed in our bus seats as we watched the insufficient snowfall, our wounds refusing to scab over.

The driver didn’t want to be there either, especially in the company of morose children. We suspected that he’d become a bus driver because he hated children, but even he must have enjoyed seeing an occasional smile.

I worried that one day the radio guy would say, “The following school will never close due to bad weather…” Then he’d read the name of my school.

There were those glorious days when the announcer’s voice said the words that I longed to hear, “New Richland-Hartland is closed today.”

Oh, be still my heart. The world was my oyster — whatever that meant. Whatever may come, I had this day. How could a person be happier than on a snow day?

Moments as big as years brought the thrill and agony of schools closing and not closing.

Some days, you eat the bear and some days, the bear eats you.

 

Hartland resident Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Sunday.