A Convenient Pleasure

I chipped away at the ice, with a screwdriver, for as long as I could take the wind, howling down the alley, rattling the ice covered trees and suggesting to me that inside was better than out. No one was waiting for me and I didn't want to go anymore, anyway.

Our national pride gets bumped and bruised when we have to admit defeat in the face of the elements, though, and deep inside I know I could still be a good Canadian even if I didn't have to struggle against such an overwhelming force. Six people dead in an accident so close to home scares me out of any desire to show my mettle or my stubbornness to admit helplessness in coping with winter. My father died at the outset of the Ice Storm of '98 and memories of struggling to wakes and the funeral service, over unrecognizable features, blurring into sloppily crazed ice sculptures is enough to ease my guilt at confining myself to the apartment until spring. I often think that if I had been around when this place was discovered I would have packed my pemmican and snowshoes and headed south, leaving this desolation for hardier folk than I. My aversion to the snow and the cold is no secret.

Inside the fire pushes wave after wave of dry heat around the room and the coffee pot has been doing double duty. The cat thinks he wants out but I can take his sulking stares; I tell him I know what's best. Do I? With my slippers and my three layers of clothes I shuffle back and forth, cramped and constrained to watching movies and re-reading chapters I've almost memorized and I contemplate the pictures a friend shows me, of the Spanish beach she's been living on and wonder, 'just how transferable are my skills'? I have feverish dreams of blue oceans and wandering endlessly down a road, tasting dust every time a car passes. I do it to myself, I do. Someone tells me I would never appreciate the heat if I didn't get a yearly reminder of what's it like to be cold, to the bone, and I reply that I would like to be the judge of that.

Ah. The gurgling sound of another pot of coffee done signals an end to this. The smell of frying bacon is heavy with the promise of a warm belly and the windows have steamed up enough that I can forget what lies on the other side. I am a man of small pleasures and easily distracted when it's convenient and right now it's very convenient.