A LITTLE BACKGROUND
When I moved to Los Angeles after college, I swore that I would never complain about the weather. After growing up with WINTER, what was there to complain about? To be sure, Buffalo, NY and its environs have a reputation for tundra-like conditions that it doesn’t deserve. We’re not Inuits. We don’t dog sled to work and school and I never once saw anyone use a snowshoe. We had several pair in the basement, along with ice-fishing equipment and an ancient violin and none of these saw the light of day. It snows, sure. It snows in a lot of the world. Buffalo is not only not the snowiest place in America, it’s not even the snowiest place in the State of New York. It’s not even the snowiest place in the county. But you’d never know that to watch the national news. Once, after I’d been in California for about five years, I read in the paper about a big snowstorm hitting Buffalo. The city was shut down. Animals were escaping the zoo. It was chaos. I called my college buddy, a public schoo...