Tag: cold

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Transient

to-homeless-grate2The harshness of the grate ground into his back, making it hard to draw in breath, but the hard chill in the air made it a necessary evil. His teeth still chattered in spite of himself, and in spite of the hot air billowing all around his clothes, emanating from the deep machinery underground that produced the hot, slick steam.

Sweat drenched the small of his back, but he dared not move for fear that someone else would take his position on the coldest night of the year. He opened his tired eyes to see two others of his ilk crouched low over the next grate over, trying to warm up their gloveless hands as if over a campfire. It had been years since he’d seen an actual campfire, but it still brought back memories.

He remembered his mother bent over the pile of already charred sticks left over from the campers who had passed through the night before they arrived, an occurrence she found fortuitous, her back hunched over from years of hard labor. Regardless, she was the epitome of grace to him, but even her memory was a bit faded at the edges she had been gone so long. Where her face used to be in his mind there was now a blur, not unlike when someone doesn’t want their identity known on a show of Cops. But he still recalled her movements, most as subtle as ash drifting low over the ground on a puff of air. She taught him how to be a man.

His back cried out to him for salvation, but it was better than being a frozen corpse, he reminded himself, so far removed from that boy he had been in the woods with his mother, so jaded by what the world had turned into while he had stopped looking. He wore a thick jacket that had been eaten in sections by the rats who often sought the refuge that his body heat provided, and he had long since let them shelter near, something that had seemed an abomination when it first started happening. But he postulated that it meant they felt comfortable with him, that he had somehow assimilated into the world that the rats inhabited, had become one with a nature that lived in harmony with the city that it too inhabited.

Another quick glance across the street at his two peers still warming their hands, but he could tell it wasn’t working, their faces trapped in looks of desperation, looks he knew all too well from more than ten years living and breathing the streets. Continue reading “Transient”

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So This is Global Warming?

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Bundle up.

Remember global warming? It was a hot-button term at the beginning of the 21st century. As our illustrious former vice president said, “It’s a certain truth. But it’s an inconvenient truth.” And yet since then we’ve recorded some of the harshest, coldest temperatures in this world’s history. In fact, today my children were home from school for a “snow” day, even though it wasn’t snowing. It was really a “frigid temperature” day, which was funny because yesterday it got up to 45 here in upstate New York. And isn’t that really the gist of the whole “global warming” issue, the idea of a global shifting of climate. Climate change, now that’s a phrase I can get on board with, but is it new?

When I was a kid growing up in Philadelphia I clearly recall a rough winter when it snowed more days than it didn’t, and during one stretch of time it didn’t stop snowing for three days straight, at the end of which we had over six feet of snow. And like good neighbors we made sure to dig out, at least to the sidewalk. There were these six foot walls of snow on either side, like we were rats in a huge, white maze. I was fascinated by it, sticking my hand out at one point while following my father, who was digging with the shovel, and touching one of the walls. My hand sunk in a little bit and was quickly covered in snow. I screamed and my dad turned around to laugh at me. I yanked my hand out of the snow and some of the wall crumbled at my feet. That was the end of that exploration.

Then, about fifteen years later, I went to New York City with a few friends of mine in order to party with another friend who lived in a dorm at NYU. We took the train in like we always did, but it was the time before instant notices ahead of time about weather situations. We knew a storm was supposed to come, but we didn’t realize it would be the blizzard of the decade, which it turned out to be. Continue reading “So This is Global Warming?”