snow

You know that song that ends with, "As I turned to make my way back home, the snow turned into rain," as an image of something warm and peaceful and an ambiguous kind of hope? Well, this morning's snow turned into freezing rain this afternoon.

I put out flyers a few days ago, looking for somebody to clear off my car when it snows. I hated doing it, because I really want to believe I can do that sort of thing for myself. It just costs so much. I end up thinking of myself as weak or lazy, trying to hire help to do something so basic. (Not to mention the money thing.) So, like I said...hard. And after confronting that difficulty and putting out ads, nobody responded.

I put it off all morning. I knew it was going to be so painful and difficult I couldn't bear the thought of doing it several times in the same day. So when the snow stopped and the freezing rain started, I loaded up with breakthrough meds and foul weather gear and went out. Most of the suggestions the OT had made turned out to be specific to clearing snow off a car that is parked on a flat surface with a lot of clear space around it on all sides. (That is rarely my problem these days.) So it was difficult, even with soft, wet, snow only about 4" deep.

While I was working, one other person came out of the building to clear the snow from his car at the other end of the parking lot. I was tempted to ask for help, but I didn't. This neighbor is 30-40 years older than I am. He wears an old-fashioned hat like my grandfather did, when my grandfather drove big boat-like cars like the one I have now. (It's not a weather-protection kind of hat. I think it's a tribly, or somesuch. This neighbor takes off when he greets me in the elevator.) If I asked him for help doing something physically difficult, I'm afraid he'd hurt himself trying to act like a gentleman. I felt like I should offer to help *him*, because that's what a good neighbor would do. But I am just about done in from the strain of clearing my own car.

Textbooks and Heaven only are Ideal

Most of the friends I rely on for book recommendations hated _Rabbit, Run_. Some read the whole thing and regarded it with detailed contempt. Some read a chapter or two and wanted to throw it against the wall. (*raises hand*) I felt that way about _The Witches of Eastwick_, too.

Yet I honor Updike for "The Dance of the Solids." It was the first crack I saw in the pernicious influence of CP Snow's model of two hostile cultures (which I now recognize as being hopelessly tangled in cold war influence. And deep in the background of Cyteen! But I digress.) It had a solidity and respectability to it, that touched me like nothing I saw until I found Primo Levi's short stories. I've seen more poetry about real science since then, but there's still something special about the memory of discovering it was possible.

I liked _The Centaur_ when I was 12. There aren't many books I carried through all my moves, but that was one of them. (There are more that stayed in my parents' house for many years until I boxed them up and moved them.) I didn't reread it often, but I read it enough to maintain a sentimental attachment to it. I won't disagree with Wordweaver Lynn's comment about the youthful pretension of untransliterated Greek...but I forgave Dunnett worse pretension. _The Centaur_ doesn't really speak to the person I am now, it doesn't speak to being a woman at all, and it's freakishly out of sympathy with being a middle-aged man. Yet it spoke to the person I was at 12, the b^H person I wanted to be at 15.

I read a bit of _The Centaur_ again last night, after seeing Updike's obituary. I realized that if I want that kind of vivid imagery, with a landscape so real I can smell it, and unsavory characters turning sexual frustration in really unpleasant directions, Michael Swanwick handles it much better. (The main advantage of Updike seems to be that he can make a complicated and unpleasant scene smell real and vivid without making it smell *disgusting*.) Swanwick has a larger range, of course, but _Dragons of Babel_ seems to take what _Centaur_ was trying to do, fix it, and then add three layers.