I missed a call from my first bride, who had recorded 6 seconds of silence. My “old school” attitude toward 21st century cell phone etiquette is this: I do not return missed calls unless there is a message. In the meantime, I watched the news and saw cars sliding and crashing on the black ice of the East coast.
During the Christmas holiday, I visited my grandchildren; when I left Newark airport to return to Indianapolis on January 4th, the temperature in New Jersey was 46 degrees. Bad weather had delayed inbound flights that had originated in Michigan, so my original flight departure was delayed from 6:29 p.m. to 11:45 p.m. I arrived at the connecting airport in Detroit at 1:45 a.m. I missed my connecting flight, but had already scheduled another flight out the morning of Jan. 5th, which meant an overnight stay in the meat locker that is the Detroit airport. Apparently, the inside temperature of the airport is supposed to match the weather outside, perhaps to keep our glasses from fogging when we leave. Anyway, when I landed in Indianapolis, the temperature was a spectacular 7 degrees. Seven. Even the frost was frozen.
I have had some memorable encounters with ice; most of them have been while I was driving a car, headed to or from Pittsburgh, Penn. My most recent skate occurred while I was driving with my two youngest children through West Virginia. I came upon a clot of stopped cars and trucks and when I tried to stop, I slid into the guardrail at the side of the road. My other choices had been into cars and under trucks, so I was quite pleased with my piloting. I had a similar experience long before my two youngest were born, when I hit a patch of black ice and slid off the road into a big gully. The back seat was a tangle of two dogs and a kid, but the tank I was driving suffered no damage, and we were able to drive out of the little valley.
On January 14th, I was using the “old man shuffle” — where the feet seldom leave contact with the ground — to cross an icy patch in a parking lot when I started down. “Here we go,” I thought, and surrendered to the inevitable. I collapsed onto my right side, then, rolled onto my back. I got up, knocked the snow from my butt, and shuffled on unharmed. The following Sunday, my first bride did a “full-body plant” and surfed the black ice on her Harlem street. She was neither as lucky as I, nor as lucky as we both were when we went skiing in the big Oldsmobile; she is recovering from badly bruised ribs.
I have a philosophy that holds that no one past the age of 8 should ever fall. I had a spectacular fall many years ago that had to have been a visual marvel but there was no ice involved. I watched my creative director fall when we were practicing together to learn to Rollerblade, but her fall was as fashionable as the rest of her life: she arranged herself on the ground. But when my all-wheel-drive SUV went into a four-wheel-slide, I knew that there was little that I could do to influence the outcome. My son asleep in the back seat and my daughter screaming beside me eliminated any thought that any this was going to be fun.
I reminded my first bride that without skates, her New York City, full-speed power walking could do little to handle that ice, ice baby.