THE DRIVEWAY


IN HONOR OF THE FIRST BIG SNOW IN THE 367 DAYS WE'VE LIVED HERE...

THE DRIVEWAY!!!!!![1]

“Oh, how can you handle shoveling all that snow!” people would say. The cold was the first thing people commented on, the snow was the second.

And it’s true. You did have to move it out of the driveway and the sidewalk. God knows that I was yelled at often enough to get off my ass and go shovel the driveway. My father would get pissed off occasionally at my lack of concern for snow removal and would bestir himself to do it. My mother would then go into something resembling a religious fervor[2] and scream:

“Your father’s going to have a heart attack! Your father’s going to have a heart attack!”

And the implication certainly was “Because of you”.

And I would drag myself outside. Begrudgingly. [3]

We had a large collection of snow-removing implements in my childhood. My father, far from a handy man and who I don’t think I ever saw swing a hammer, seemed incapable of parting with a tool, especially a yard tool. They had only bought a house after I was born, but I’m fairly certain some of the tools came from a previous house – if not a previous century.

There were snow shovels with aluminum blades; an ice scraper that looked like it may have gone with Shakelton to the Antarctic. It had a long wooden handle and a short blade and could be used to either scrape the ice off the sidewalk or chip away at it if it got that thick[4]. There were two shovels with green blades and long wooden handles. The blades were shaped something like the plow on a snowplow and I remember the old man coming home with them, thrilled at his purchase.

They were for pushing, see? You didn’t have to pick the snow up and throw it. You could PUSH it to the side of the driveway[5]. Much easier.

No. It’s not. It’s never MUCH easier. It might be a BIT easier. But people who sell things like this never take into account that you have to put the snow SOMEWHERE. Driveways with a house on one side and a hedge on the other provided very little room for PUSHING and beyond a certain point you had to heft and tote. And while I don’t mind the snow terribly much, the occasional blizzard that’s given us a reputation does produce a lot of it and it becomes a real problem to dispose of the snow.[6]

My dad was the kind of guy who would get excited about a new snow shovel – even if the rake in the garage only had four tines and was made by a blacksmith on a forge. A driveway or sidewalk wasn’t cleared until it looked like June. He would want the snow shoveled, the ice scraped and then a liberal application of a broom to remove all traces of snow. When I started writing this I was thinking about the different kinds of shovels we had and had to research on the Internet. It turns out that one of the old shovels was what’s called a “barn shovel”. It had deep blade with a sharp edge and was apparently designed for shoveling shit. Now my dad was better at shoveling shit than most, but in a purely metaphorical way and as a guy who traveled to New York City to buy his suits at Brooks Brothers[7], I have no clue how this came into his possession.

Our first day back in WNY, we took a quick jog to Target to pick up some necessities. And by “necessities”, I mean “everything”. After all, what we still owned was on a truck somewhere between Los Angeles and Amherst, NY and all we had with us was what was in the suitcases. That meant nothing to cook on and not much to sleep on. So a trip to Target was kind of like the Starret family going into town in “Shane”…you had to pick up necessities.

And, of course, we needed snow shovels.

What I didn’t know is that there were huge advances in show shovel technology since my boyhood.

[1] Insert dramatic music sting. DA-DA-DUMMMMMMMMM!

[2] It sounded like want I imagine the girls who set off the Salem Witch Trials sounded like.

[3] And occasionally only after evaluating the plusses and minuses of being an orphan.

[4] More on this piece of fun in a moment.

[5] I will point out that my father only owned a house with a driveway wider than one car for one year and it was in a part of New York that didn’t get much snow and was in a particularly dry year.

[6] Perhaps you can push it, but not without the air of a motor vehicle.

[7] Before they expanded.

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