Our prayers for snow have been answered. And not just any snow. None of that miserable old ice-stormy, dippin-dotsy, daggers-in-the-facey, hand-you-a-hefty-bag-as-you-load-the-chairlifty, blown-out-of-a-hosey, East-Coasty, Californiacky kind of snow. Intoxicating, perfect, Colorado snow. The kind you need a snorkel to ski in. My parents called it “champagne.” My generation named our cocaine after it. The kids after us finally got it right, and simply called it “fresh.” On the second afternoon of the storm, Kaisha and I went up the trail, and since we had the blizzard completely to ourselves, I let her off leash. She darted like a dolphin into the trees, came wading back, then bounded off again. I walked uphill through eighteen inches with only a little effort. Proper snow.
Of course, after forty more inches over the next two weeks, it’s no longer such eiderdown. Today the same trail was hardpacked and squeaky. It’s a pen-and-ink sort of day, the sky and snow a blank page behind every black protruding thing. Already some of us are starting to whine about the accumulation and the cold (I’ve suggested they take Greyhound to Maine via Buffalo, which shuts them up), and students are pissed off about not getting a snow day last week. And so now the inevitable wait of winter, already freighting down the entire East Coast, has begun to descend on us.
Waiting is what winter is for, after all. Marcus waits for word on his college applications. I’m waiting to see if the final combination of meds will work before I head to the hospital to “consider next steps.” I’m booked for a few days in March into a ward called the EMU, short for Epilepsy Monitoring Unit. It’s apparently 24/7 video surveillance, complete with a round-the-clock EEG. Then they deprive you of meds to make you seize, to try to detect a focal point they can zap or remove. Perhaps because of my surname and my height, I am somehow perversely drawn to being an emu for a week; I imagine joining a special exhibit in the medical zoo, where the keepers wait for the emus to squawk and flap their flightless wings. I suppose it’s part of the whole adventure. Not that I’m signing up for any of those “next steps” before getting a lot more information – for instance, have they mapped the lobe that controls metaphor? – but the EMU is all about information, so into the zoo we go. Besides, it seems a more productive way for me to wait for my future than many I can think of.
Meanwhile, I handed off my last litigation case to another lawyer last Friday. My law practice is now all mediation, all the time, much of it in Spanish. Many of the clients are young parents, never married to each other, talking about dividing “rights” but in reality sharing responsibilities to care for their infants and toddlers. Dads just out of boyhood, raised fatherless, desperate to give their sons what they never had, but clueless as to how. I tell them parenting is a long game, to stay close and be patient for confidence and skills to build, for bonds to form, for opportunities to open. To wait. The Spanish verb “to wait”, esperar, is also the verb “to hope.” So I tell them to hope, which of course is what we all do, with the approach of spring.