You Be the Judge

A few doors down from me lives a couple with 3-year-old twins. After the storm, they dug out their car. On Sunday they had to run an errand with their kids. On their return one hour later, they found that someone had parked in the space they cleared. They did not recognize the car.

They left a note on the windshield, explaining that they had cleared the spot, and that they needed to park in front of their house for the sake of their young kids. Later in the day, they noticed that the note had been removed from the windshield and torn up. The remnants were visible inside the stranger's car.

I learned all this while shoveling out my own car Sunday afternoon. The mother of the twins was relating it to a plow driver she had flagged down. "Money!" she yelled, and the man pulled over. They did not want help clearing out a new spot, she explained. Then her husband took over. "I want to bury him," he said, while gesturing to the stranger's car.

It didn't take long. The plow made a few passes and rammed a mountain of solid-pack snow against the driver's side of the stranger's car. Then the couple went inside.

About 40 minutes later, a young man walked past me, got up to the buried car, and yelled (very loudly, with children just across the street) "F**K!" He got into his car through the passenger side, started it, tried to gun his way from the spot and saw that his car was going nowhere. He walked back up the street and asked me, "What happened here?"

I said I didn't know, and that plows had been coming regularly up and down the street. He asked if I had an extra shovel, which I didn't. So he trudged to the hardware store a few blocks away and came back with a new shovel. Then he started shoveling out his car, not by throwing the snow in some kind of pile, but by whipping it into the middle of the street. When I went inside 20 minutes later, he was still working.

I can't decide if this is an example of society working perfectly, or horribly.

Snowed in

Sometimes weather drives us to horrible things, like cannibalism. On Saturday, I suffered a much worse fate: I had to watch "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."

Oh god. The screams ...

Tags: snow