As I write this, it’s snowing in Hoboken, like really snowing, not the usual two inch snowfall that everyone pretends is real snow. Global warming is real, y’all; when I was kid we had a lot more snow in these parts, and a lot more sticky snow that was around for weeks and weeks. I can recall the blackening snow drifts of my youth with … well, not exactly affection, but a kind of weird nostalgia, the way you’ll remember a bully from grammar school and hope they got the therapy they obviously needed and had that long talk with their father they obviously needed.
In my town, like most, homeowners are legally responsible for clearing snow from their sidewalks, and you can tell a lot about a person by how they approach this. Some folks are up three hours before the storm ends, and pretty much shovel constantly all day. Some folks clear their entire sidewalk, some folks leave a narrow Moria-like path that one person can barely fit on, causing many awkward dances during the day. Some folks wait until the evening hours to see if someone else will kindly shovel their sidewalks, and some folks don’t do it at all, allowing their sidewalks to transform into a slip-n-slide of packed-down ice.
Me, I’m an expert.
Dig Dug Ain’t Got Nothin’ On Me
I don’t say that lightly. The house where I grew up in Jersey City is located on a corner, and the lot included a driveway. My parents were enthusiastic believers that idle hands made your children intolerable, and also enthusiastic believers that the whole reason you had children was to assign them chores you didn’t want to do. So when it snowed, my brother Yan and I were required and expected to shovel the front porch, the porch steps, the sidewalk in front and on the side of the house, and the entire driveway just in case we had to drive to the emergency room, or flee an invading army, or Dad got a hankering for a Whopper. This was easily several hours of work, every time it snowed.
We tried to half-ass it, of course, but our mother was a tough supervisor, and we had Mr. Clean. Mr. Clean was an early retiree living off one of those legendary pensions you read about in romance novels and urban fantasies, and Mr. Clean didn’t have a whole lot to do. So he dedicated himself to cleaning up our neighborhood and complaining. If we’d had an HOA, Mr. Clean would have been the self-appointed enforcer.
If you did a shitty job shoveling your sidewalk, Mr. Clean would passive-aggressively finish the job behind you, and lord help you if he caught up with you. That meant an excruciatingly long lecture on how to properly shovel your sidewalk. It didn’t matter that I was 12 years old, Mr. Clean wanted to express his general disappointment in my character and work ethic (in this he channeled my dear Nanny, who also regarded me not so much as a grandson as an example of modern parenting, which is to say bad parenting), and he would do so at length.
As a result, I became the greatest snow shoveling machine ever known. Not to evade my parents’ punishments, or because of any kind of shame (to this day I am unfamiliar with the emotion), but to evade Mr. Clean’s lectures.
Today my house is exactly 12 feet wide. I don’t have a driveway — I don’t even own a car. My snow shoveling duties take about 20 minutes on a bad day, and I don’t even break a sweat. While my neighbors scowl and pant, I churn through that snow like John Henry driving steel, and then for fun I shovel my neighbors’ sidewalks as well. Because no matter how much snow I shovel it will never be as much as I handled as a kid … and because I can still hear Mr. Clean’s sharp, whiny voice coming up behind me (he’s still alive, and still living in my old neighborhood, he must be about 110 years old but apparently he still shovels the snow, and yes that exact sentence will undoubtedly be used to describe me someday).
The way things are going, the day is coming when I won’t have to shovel snow at all. The good news is that this will likely coincide with me discovering that I am the proud owner of waterfront property. HUZZAH!