blizzard hoagie

It's 12:41 in the PM, and I haven't had a single thought today.  I wrote a couple sentences about mental midgets, but I erased them on the grounds that the expression "mental midget" is a violation against political correctness, though what sort of voilation it is I am not exactly sure.  In any case, it snowed yesterday, and I shovelled my ass off.  The various weather experts said that we got 12 inches of snow, but I am quite sure they are wrong.  It seemed a lot more like 18 inches to me.  In some places, notably the sidewalks, the snow was two feet deep on account of the plowing.  Up and down the street, men with snowblowers made poor time because the snow was too deep for their machines.  Rick Bramucci, the man who plows our driveway, was still out plowing after nine PM.  He attempted to plow our drive in the morning but the cars parked in it thwarted him.  We would have been buried.  Around lunch time I put my shovel down and ate this three-egg sandwich.  It was too dry, not enough butter or cheese.  Nonetheless, I consumed it while looking out the window and reflecting upon the snow storm.

 
Growing up in a Chicago suburb, I was always impressed by the neighborliness that a good snow storm could whip up in the people who lived around me.  Not everyone owned a snow blower, but it was customary for those who did to clear a neighbor's sidewalk once they'd finished clearing their own.  Same for the old: you simply did not allow an old neighbor to shovel his own walk or driveway.  They could come out afterward and srpead some sand, but that's about it.  Yesterday, this was happening all around me.  I was shovelling the sidewalk of a building across the street, which I do for pay, when a neighbor pushing a borrowed snow blower came shuffling down the sidewalk and attempted to help me out.  He had to quit because the snow was too deep for him, but I appreciated the gesture.  Later in the afternoon, once I'd cleared our driveway so that the plow could come through, our neighbors offered their driveways to us so that we could temporarily park our cars there.  It was a lot of snow, and dealing with it would have been impossible without teamwork.  Today, happily, we can go back to our independent lives.