To the ladies and gentlemen of Erie: I'm sorry. This weather is my fault. I wanted a white Christmas. I didn't expect the weather, in the holiday spirit, to be so giving.
So the past five days have been ridiculous, and, despite the life-hazarding conditions of the roads, I'm kind of loving it. Every road is now paved with a broken sheet of ice that wants to throw the wheels in four different directions at once. The wind has blown so hard that occasionally one must aim one's car through three-foot drifts. Sunday night I got out of work at 12:15 a.m. (technically Monday morning) and the five of us braced ourselves and walked out into a blizzard.
That was the second worst driving experience of my life. At first it was fun. Driving along the Bayfront, almost alone on the road, with the old factories brooding under the bluffs and the masts of the sailboats glowing spookily in the light from the wharves, I watched tendrils of snow rippling in waves like mist across the pavement, eerily, playfully, occasionally whipping into a dervish, a reverse tornado spiraling up ex nihilo from the ground. I felt like an accidental witness to a different world, an elemental world of bodiless spirits that emerges only when human eyes hide in sleep. It gusted around me, slightly malicious at my intrusion, teasing, showing off its ghostly powers to the puny mortal creeping among the players of its weird and beautiful symphony.
I wouldn't miss this for anything, I thought as I turned onto 955 through Lawrence Park. It was a little like driving through water, if one could see the individual molecules. Where the streetlights glowed, a little light illuminated the crystals of snow, throwing everything into spaces of rich and shallow orange.
But that's when I almost changed my mind. Suddenly I felt I was in the middle of Alaska. (A presumptuous feeling; I've never, oh-so-sadly, been to Alaska. Somehow that fact is more bitter to me than the fact that I've never been to Europe; I've always wanted, Shasta-like, to head North.) On Route 20 the weather tore off all pretext of playfulness and howled around me. In that instant any anthropomorphic imaginings vanished; this was the Nature of Stephen Crane, utterly indifferent, impersonal, with a power that rendered all human attempts at civilizing the planet absurd, a child attempting to make an umbrella out of cellophane and kindling in the face of a hurricane.
I couldn't see. In places the snow erased any visibility at all, and on an open highway I slowed to 25 miles per hour and peered at the road immediately ahead of me, which could only be recognized by the treadmarks of former traffic in the snow. I used them as my guidelines; I couldn't see the edge of the road. I didn't know where I was. The wind buffeted my parents' light little foreign car in any direction but forward. I didn't know if I drove in the right lane, or if I was on the wrong side of the highway altogether. I only knew that I was driving roughly in the direction of home.
I mumbled prayers under my breath, gripped the wheel, and kept driving. Somewhere I passed familiar landmarks, but they were invisible and I was blind. I only relaxed a little bit once the lights of the strip at the head of the Valley leading into my town began to glimmer into view; and then I stared in utter amazement as the snow blocked even the light farther than a fifth-mile ahead.
I parked in the driveway with a breath of relief, bundled up into my warmest pajamas, turned on the electric blanket, and sipped scalding tea in bed. It was idiotic to attempt the drive home -- forty mintues on a clear day -- I had been offered a couch at the house of a coworker who lived much closer to the store than I. But unless conditions are completely unbearable, I have this compulsion to sleep in my own bed, use my own toothbrush, bury my face in my own pillow, wake up in my own home. Couches are seldom long enough for me to sleep comfortably (Meg and Phillip's is the one grand exception), and there's the problem of the absence of my happy pills.
Gah. Speaking of which. The devilfish got me by the throat this past weekend. A combination of exhaustion, stress and hormones threw me into the kind of tailspin that only happens a few times a year and completely wipes me out. I felt badly for my parents; I kept it bottled in in high school, went more or less catatonic at times in college, and in the four years of living independently far from family I learned how to deal in my own way: I would vanish, drop off everyone's radar, and curl in on myself alone in my apartment until I was well enough to reemerge and let everyone know where I'd been and that I'd recovered. So this weekend was the first time my parents have really seen me in that state, and I didn't know how to handle their seeing it any more than they did. Uncomfortable all around.
I found myself, though, really looking forward to church on Sunday. I woke up weepy and dragged myself around the house getting ready, wanting only the compassionate eyes of the girls with whom I've reconnected in the Baptist church. And I prayed. I prayed and prayed and prayed. And dealing with it in terms of community (the girls at church were wonderful) and in terms of flinging myself at God brought me through it much more quickly than usual. The entombment generally lasts three days; this time I was more or less fine in twenty-four hours. For which I'm grateful. A sentence popped into my mind as I readied for church that morning, wondering who on earth would put up with me like this, how I could even ask anyone, anyone at all, to love me in such a broken condition, how God could possibly use me for any good whatsoever when I was such a mess (Laura says I need to engage in more healthy self-dialogue. She's right, of course), and the sentence came visually into my mind's eye: You don't have to be whole to be effective.
Ironically -- or no; paradoxically, as all of Christianity is a glorious paradox -- it was relaxing in that knowledge that brought me to a quicker temporary wholeness. Grace is sufficient. And God loves me, has always loved me, when I've least been, or thought myself, loveable. Which (again the paradox) frees me more to let other people love me.
Ah, the strangeness. Ah, the growth. Ah, the healing -- constant, slow, up-hill.
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