Posted: Monday, 01 March 2010 12:45PM
Warmth On A Cold Scranton Day
Steve Corbett Reporting
Monday, March 01, 2010
With innocence shining from her soft, dark eyes, eight-year-old Jennifer Lopez made a promise to herself.
“One day,” she said, “I will go to the snow.”
“Yes you will,” I said during our recent visit to California for her birthday party.
Until that day, however, she must depend on her imagination, books, movies and stories from people like me and Stephanie who live in the snow to fuel her hopes and dreams.
I promised long ago to build Jennifer a snowman and send her a picture.
But the time never seemed right.
Until yesterday.
My shoveling was over for the day and the snow that remained was heavy enough to pack.
Standing alone in my Scranton garden, I thought back about 50 years ago. It’s been about that long since I built a snowman and I was way out of practice. We forget childhood too easily.
So I figured the best way to start was to just dig in and get going. I thought about packing a small snow ball and then rolling it on the ground until I made a big ball for the base. But I didn’t have enough room in the garden and the idea melted in my mind.
Instead, I packed a big base and treated the snow like a sculptor would treat a statue. I used an ice chopper and a shovel. The ball looked more like a pedestal but I was on the right track.
But I struggled in my solitude to figure out how to get a bigger ball on top of the first ball.
Then I had an epiphany.
Do it my way.
So what else is new?
I probably did the same as a kid and eventually realized that working and playing in the snow depended a lot on originality. Besides, the snow man would appreciate coming to life no matter how he got there.
Of course all snow men are alive.
No matter how cold the snow, ice and temperature, deep inside snow men have a warm heart.
That’s why kids like them. That’s why a snow man is always happy and never sad – even when he melts. A snow man knows that he will always return.
So I made a smaller ball and then another and then another. I placed one on top of the other until my snow man gained in height and stature. He toppled twice but I knew that everybody topples at one time or another.
I laughed out loud like a madman and simply put him back together again.
Stephanie laughed out loud when she came out on the back porch to see what I was up to.
“Open up the cellar door,” I said. “I need coal.”
“And a carrot,” I said. “Do we have a carrot left?”
The coal bag was where I left it when I bought it last year to give coal to another child who had never seen the magic, black rocks of Scranton. And the carrot was left over from the last time Stephanie made “sopa,” a spicy Mexican soup that Jennifer’s mother, Linda, taught her to make.
I made a nice smile with coal chunks and chose two perfect pieces for his eyes. The carrot made a great nose. I added the finishing touch of a straw cowboy hat I bought in Mazatlan, Mexico during a trip there a few years ago.
“Ole!” I shouted.
Stephanie took pictures of me hugging the snow man and standing beside my new friend the way I stand beside Jennifer’s daddy, my friend Benito.
Benito has never seen snow, either.
“Un dia,” I tell him, Linda, Jennifer and her brother and sister, Tony and Lucero.
“One day you will all come to the snow.”
Everybody laughs.
Compared to California and Mexico, Scranton is a cold, cold place.
But the love that Senor Snowman casts in the garden is more than enough to keep us warm.
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Corbett
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