Mother Nature chuckled as we in the Midwest gloried in the mild temperatures of our fall and early winter. We strode the streets and sidewalks of our neighborhoods, and in my North Irvington neighborhood, dogs pulled their humans behind them. And then, with a great cackle and flourish, Mother Nature dropped the beat — uh, temperature, and covered our streets with snow and ice.
In one of our concerts, the Irvington Community Chorus performed a song from Randall Thompson’s musical arrangements called “Frostiana,” based on Robert Frost’s poems. The song that we performed was crafted around the poem “The Road Not Taken.” I go “walkabout” often in my ‘hood, and when I looked out the window at the nasty weather, I remembered this past January, when I suffered “An Embarrassment of Winter” (Weekly View, Jan. 24, 2025.) I flopped onto my back two times on the same day, the result of incautious steps onto snow-covered ice. During our recent “Ice-Pocalypse” I ventured out on what I thought was a favorable day, and midway down one street, my foot slid on a skim of ice. I turned around and retraced my steps back home.
I recently gave a friend a snippet from a stand-up routine that I performed at a function given by the staff of the psychiatric hospital where I worked in the early 1960s. I told her that we cool cats in the ‘Burgh — Pittsburgh Pennsylvania — were all trying to buy and wear full-length leather coats. We also wore slick-soled leather shoes, and when we approached an ice-covered hill in the Hill District, we walked very gingerly. We knew that had we slipped and fallen at the top of the hill, we would have screamed and ridden our leather coats like a toboggan down the hill and into the street. But encouraged by the sight of a few of the dogs of my ‘hood trotting ahead of their owners on a recent day during our current ice period, I ventured into the street again. As I stepped along the street, I thought of some of the singers that I was aware of, singers with “ice” in their names: Ice T, Ice Cube, Vanilla Ice. I tried to avoid stepping on any of them as I toe-heeled my way along. I noticed how there was a greater concentration of ice where the trees blocked the sun and I carefully picked my way down the street, placing one foot after the other onto the tracks created by the passage of cars.
My picky path down the street and back was a testament to the choices that I made in selecting onto which piece of ground I trod. My trip was short — a mere .72 miles according to my watch — but relatively uneventful. A few times, my left foot slid a short way, a gentle ski from a small slope of ice onto the hardpack of the blacktop. It was always my left foot, the wounded warrior that made the draft board reject me when I was 18 years old (“My Left Foot” Weekly View, Feb. 15th, 2018.)
Robert Frost wrote that, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” and the narrator lamented that “(they) were sorry that (they) could not travel both…” I chose carefully between ice and tar, placing my faith and future in the security of the second. Taking my cue from Frost, two tracks led down the street, and I took the one less iced. I arrived home safely, and the choices I made that day were what Frost called the thing that “made all the difference.”
cjon3acd@att.net