After several days of unseasonably warm and springlike weather, winter came back tonight, riding on the back of an avenging wind that wanted to drive the breath from your lungs and teach you a lesson for having dared to believe that you’d seen the last of him for another year.

The snow was just starting as I stepped off the evening train; I flipped up the collar of my pea coat against the wet, spattering flakes that were coming in almost horizontally from the north. The temperatures had been relatively mild when I’d boarded a half-hour and 25 miles ago, and I gasped at the abrupt change for the worse. Then the sky brightened and shimmered in a truly weird display, lightning in the belly of a snowstorm, and I knew it was going to be one hell of a night.

That was when the old man reached out for my shoulder with a trembling, knobby hand that looked to have been warped by a serious case of arthritis.

“Pardon me, sir, but are you driving somewhere from here?

Continue Reading…

About a week before Valentine’s Day, my darling Girlfriend and I were talking on the phone about how neither of us had a clue about what to get the other in honor of the annual February bacchanalia of hearts, chocolate, and the color pink. I don’t know how truly stressed she was feeling about the lack of ideas, but I was an anxious wreck this year. V-Day has always felt like a trial to me, a minefield seemingly designed to trip up well-meaning but clueless guys who just don’t have the ingenuity to measure up to the nebulous feminine concept that is “romance.” Guys like me, in other words, at least when it comes to socially mandated displays of romance such as, say, a holiday dedicated to the idea. And those mines seem to get closer together with every passing year, too, increasing the chances that one of these Valentine’s Days, inevitably, I will step in the wrong place and lose a leg. Every February 1st, I begin the month thinking, “Good lord, how am I supposed to top that one year when I actually managed to get everything right? And didn’t I just go through all this with Christmas a few weeks ago?” You see, it was drilled into my head eons ago that V-Day is supposed to be a big deal to women, and god be with the man who gets it wrong.

So I was taken completely aback when I heard Anne saying, “Why don’t we just forget Valentine’s this year?”

“What?” I stammered. This was an unexpected development.

“No, I mean it. I enjoy the cute little teddy bears and the flowers and all, but really, what good are they? You display them for a couple days, then they go into a box or get thrown out. It’s all really pretty silly.”

“Ooooookay.” I had all my antennae up at this point, scanning to see if the Bothans had gotten it wrong and the superlaser was, in fact, fully operational.

“I know you love me,” she continued. “You show me all the time.”

And just like that, all the tension evaporated. On the big day itself, while other men were spending half a week’s pay on roses and fancy dinners that require reservations and clean shirts, Anne and I exchanged cards — this holiday is largely an invention of the Hallmark company, after all — and then we went to the mall for corn dogs.

Yep, I love that girl all right…

I have this friend at work, a guy about my age who shares my somewhat, ahem, old-fashioned tastes in entertainment, and we often have a good time discussing stuff no one remembers except us. A couple months ago, we were in the midst of one such conversation when we came to an unexpected epiphany. It seems a startling number of the TV shows we enjoyed as small boys — think early to mid-1970s — shared essentially the same premise. See if this sounds familiar: there’s a guy roaming the countryside, sometimes with a sidekick or two but usually alone. Sometimes he’s on a personal quest, sometimes he’s on the run from something, and oftentimes it’s both. Every week he arrives in some new location, where he finds the residents have a problem — a corrupt sheriff ruling with an iron fist, an evil developer trying to strong-arm people into giving up their land, outlaws who terrorize the villagers every full moon… you get the idea. Our hero has unique skills or insight and is able to help the people out; then, at the end of every episode, he’s compelled to move on before the adversary who is pursuing him can catch up. As a shorthand notation, my friend and I refer to this premise as “the guy wandering around helping people.”

Continue Reading…