What the Ice Cannot Preserve
The last time the ice came, it arrived in a sheet more than an inch thick. We huddled under covers and read by candlelight. The grown-ups drank cowboy coffee and picked the grounds from their teeth with frozen forks. Hindered by impassable roads, the electric company worked at a snail’s pace. The power was out for two weeks, and the temperatures refused to rise and melt the stuff. Trees and limbs continued to give way, crashing into power lines under the extra weight. My siblings and I gloried in days off school, blissfully unaware of the extra burdens being laid upon the adults.
Our stove was electric and therefore useless, so my father walked every morning to Donald’s Donuts. Sometimes one of us would go too, crunching along beside him on the slippery sidewalks. The rest would wait in the living room, bundled together on the couch, groggy and giddy at another day out of the classroom.
Donald’s Donuts was a neighborhood institution back then, but has since relocated due to rising rents. It was the variety of donut shop that existed long before Instagram. When a baker’s dozen consisted of precisely four glazed, three chocolate, three jelly, two powdered sugar, and a coconut for my mother. At Donald’s, you were more likely to find a row of retirees bellied up to the counter, basting themselves in the thick aroma of percolating coffee, than to stumble across anything resembling the maple-bacon-glazed concoction that preens itself behind the plexiglass today.
The walk took a long time. It was over a mile and a half each way, and the streets had not been cleared. But my father walked it with vigor. He lived for these moments, instances where he could assume an illogical task, not out of necessity, but out of a desire to be generous, to offer some grand gesture. This is how I like to remember him.
But I may be wrong about the name. It might not have been Donald’s Donuts. Could it have been Howard’s? That part is a little fuzzy, but the details do not always matter.
*
Bounding in on his return, he smiled and sniffled through his mustache, oversized donut box held aloft. He removed his ski cap and his gloves and blew into his hands to warm them, but he did not take off his Starter Diamond Collection New York Yankees jacket. Its classic navy shell was shiny, but dark circles decorated it where hanging icicles had blessed him as he passed. He kept it buttoned up against the cold, the pinstripes of the woven collar hugging him warmly, like the arms of Lady Liberty herself, reminding you and everyone else in Memphis from whence he had come.
The memory of this whole scene sparkles, as if the icicles themselves had fallen into his black hair and onto his jacket and clung to him, drawn to this man who had left New York so many years ago, who had left behind winter days like this. Wiping away the fog from his thick glasses, he would use some absurd adjective like “splendiferous” to describe our feast. He was having a better time than we were. His eyes reflected a feeling he would not give voice to, that this was a beautiful moment, despite the challenges: a once-in-a-lifetime ice storm in Memphis, Tennessee. We would never see the likes of it again, this February morning encased in a glacier. It would indeed go on to be known simply as “The Ice Storm” in local lore. And we got to spend it eating donuts on the living room floor, a thick blanket protecting us from the frigid hardwood. Up and down the street, a bright stillness reigned, and all was quiet except for the occasional tinkling of falling ice.
*
Looking back, I believe it was this same passion that animated most of his life, even and especially his anger. You have to understand how such small things can be magical, how unexpected holidays can live with you forever. You have to understand the potential of the world to have the kind of anger he had. To have an intensity so fervid that it blew to pieces unexpectedly when it wanted to, or when it needed to. At an injustice, or perceived selfishness, or simply an ignored request, sometimes totally out of proportion to the crime committed, or in the absence of any crime at all. You have to understand how wonderful life can be and expect others to help you bring it about, to be so severely disappointed when reality falls short.
Suddenly there could be a shattered plate, or a cracked TV. A roared profanity could shake the house and shake your bones, and the reverberation could linger for days. Compromises and apologies were not part of our vocabulary. You simply waited for the anger to dissipate. Finally, over fried eggs weeks later, the smell of Tennessee Pride breakfast sausage heavy in the air, the floodwaters would recede, and a peace would settle over the table, uneasy and uncertain.
“Pass the salt?” he would ask.
*
The house is always cold in the winter now. One reason is that it is an old house, built so long ago that if I guessed at the age, I might be off by decades. Finding out the date would be easy, but looking it up somehow feels wrong, which I know is illogical. Or maybe it isn’t. It reminds me of another story about donuts. A story I heard on the radio of a woman in New Jersey who used to buy two of them at Dunkin’ Donuts every day after her commute over the border into New York City. Then the city passed a law, the first of its kind, that required the posting of calorie counts. New Jersey had no such law. The woman changed her routine, now buying her breakfast before getting on the train, wallowing happily in the peace of willful ignorance. There is something silly and beautiful in that. On the radio, an economist called it “information avoidance.” Apparently, they study it as if it is some strange phenomenon, but I am not sure what about it needs studying. Logic may conclude that more information is better, but something inside of us that wants to protect us, or simply wants us to be happy, says otherwise. Some information is good while other information is bad. We must choose what to keep and what to discard. Sometimes, we choose neither and just avoid it altogether.
The house is also cold simply because my mother keeps it that way. It is expensive to keep an old house warm, no matter how many towels you stuff under the doors and how many foam cubes you cram into the windows. Cold seeps in through the walls and soaks into the hardwood from the crawlspace. For every dollar spent to warm the inside, two more flutter through the crevices beneath the eaves.
*
I left Memphis, eventually, and bounced around cities in the Northeast and Southwest. I met my wife in New Jersey, where the winter air attacks as soon as you step outside, where every February makes you reconsider your life choices. Together, we moved to San Diego, where eternal spring crowds out the other seasons, and the idea of winter and ice live only on TV, and snow is something in the mountains, where you go to ski, and you can simply avoid it year round if you choose.
But this past year, we visited Memphis. We visited my mother, who still lives in the house I grew up in. We arrived in late January, in the teeth of what Memphis believes to be winter, cold air and cold wind, but often nothing more. My wife was scheduled to fly out in the first few days of February, and I was to follow a few days later. We had forgotten what Februaries were like, even mild ones in the South, had forgotten what makes them miserable, and had we remembered, we might never have gone.
Toward the end of our trip, we watched in disbelief as the doomsayers on TV began to sound the alarm. One day, they forecasted a smattering of ice. The next, they raised it to a full inch. Jitters spread throughout the city and cold, disembodied whispers multiplied. Was it happening again? Leading up to the occasional dusting of snow over the almost thirty years since the big one, Memphians would reminisce, “Do you remember in ’94…” Now, as reality took hold that we were looking at something akin to the worst winter storm the city had ever faced, its implications became apparent, and runs on the grocery store began in earnest. School was canceled in anticipation, something not unusual in the South. In a place that may or may not get a single snowflake in a given year, there is no budget for plows, no money for salting the roads.
The boyhood wonder I expected to follow these forecasts only danced at the edges. It flashed intermittently to life when I thought about empty days, reading books under a mountain of blankets, candles and flashlights casting long shadows in darkened rooms. But soon, adulthood weighed down on me like the ice would on the trees. What would happen to my wife’s flight? Would we lose power? How would we charge our phones? Were there enough shelters for the homeless? The eve of this adventure did not square with the carefree memories of my childhood, and trying to recapture it felt like forcing together two mismatched puzzle pieces. As the temperature dropped, I began to consider who would walk to get the donuts.
*
On the morning of the storm’s arrival, the cars were already coated with thick frost, and we woke to what sounded like rain slapping against the roof, but there was a mixture of sleet snuck in amongst the droplets. The power was still on, but roads would soon freeze over. Schools had been right to close, and the grocery stores had almost certainly been emptied of milk and bread. The ice-crazed mind desires only things that rot.
At breakfast, as soon as my mother took our eggs off the skillet, the lights flickered, and flickered again, and then they did not. A strange brightness reflected off the frozen precipitation outside, and beams of sunshine snuck through the clouds and into the dining room. The house had barely darkened, but we could feel the absence of electricity. Silence spread through every room, but it was not heavy or foreboding. It had arrived suddenly and softly.
After a long moment, we counted our blessings for the eggs, the broiled sourdough toast, and the half-full pot of coffee. It was nine-thirty in the morning. When faced with both a crisis and a hot breakfast, it is advisable to take the breakfast first. And so we did.
*
As the morning wore on, the ice began to thicken on the vehicles and the roads, but most dangerously on the trees. They fought valiantly, but like any parent who has held an overripe toddler will know, even a well-trained arm will eventually give out. As each one reached its limit, the ice-laden limbs up and down the street began to surrender with crunches and crashes. The plummeting weight of them crushed cars and snapped power lines and tore chunks out of houses. To preserve what precious heat we had, we dared not open the doors to get a better look. We craned our necks at the windows, perched on our toes like meerkats.
The first memory was abrupt, emerging fully formed and all at once, like an ice cube sliding from a tray. As my eyes strained to see the damage down the road, I remembered our former neighborhood spy, Ms. Martha. She must have spent half of her golden years at the curtains across the street, her nose and glasses peeking out past the drapes, determined to miss nothing suspicious out on the sidewalk. The young family that moved into the house when she died likely knew nothing of her proclivity for bearing witness to the neighborhood’s drama-less comings and goings. Knew nothing of the significance of those
windows, the import of those drapes.
That act of cracking the curtains had brought her momentarily back to life, and I glanced across the street to where she had lived, half expecting to see her yellow curls at the window, her neck craned just like mine, and her wide eyes taking one last gulp. She had loved bird watching, and gardening, I think. She had been friends with Mrs. Coffee who lived down the road, and whose property we called the Coffee Grounds. This is what my mind had reduced her to. This was her in her entirety.
I should have understood this vision to be foreshadowing, but I did not. I guess there is no way that I could have. How is it that such a simple action, the parting of a curtain, could latch on to that memory like the setting of a hook in a fish’s mouth, could drag it so effortlessly to the surface?
*
We took stock after breakfast. Plenty of candles and matches. An auxiliary battery pack fully charged. A bag of charcoal in the basement, and a rusting Weber in the backyard. Plenty of bread and peanut butter. A bottle of bourbon. How do you make cowboy coffee? I would have to google it.
The fridge and freezer would last until evening. I could venture out tomorrow. I could brave the cold, avoid the ice. Some of the magic was returning. Candlelight on its own can do that. The absence of TV adds to it immensely. A physical book, and that pad and that pen. Yes, I believe it was back.
As the thermostat plunged, I enlisted a third pair of socks to do battle with the hardwood, but my California wardrobe was severely limited. I did not dare go out to the grill with my flimsy pullover and thin sweatpants. My mother eventually said, “Why don’t you wear your dad’s Yankees jacket? It’s still in the closet.”
Of course it was still in the closet. Truth be told, I had not forgotten about the jacket so much as never considered it. Surely, it would be too big.
The dining room closet was small and shallow. The collected sleeves inside brushed against the door when we closed it, and squeezing anything in or out had always been an ordeal. When I was growing up, and six of us lived in this small house with three bedrooms, the closet had been crammed with coats and sweaters, some buried far enough inside that we could never find them, even if we knew they were there. Wrapping paper tubes and recycled gift bags lived in that closet as well, stacked against the walls, constantly falling over onto our legs and feet as we rummaged inside.
“I think it will fit just fine,” my mom said. She disappeared to go find warmer clothes of her own.
After a quick battle with the gift bags, I found it, on the left-hand side. The contents of the closet had thinned considerably, with more real estate opening after the exodus of each child, until just my parents’ clothes hung there, comfortable but lonely in their newfound expanse. I pulled the coat from the closet, admired the pinstripe collar, the snap buttons, and the white stitching of the N and Y on the breast. But the letters were fraying at the edges. There was a discoloration of the white fabric in places, tinged brown where it had never been before. A deterioration had occurred, without my notice, without my knowledge, and without my consent.
I slipped it over one arm and then the other. I expected it to swallow me, because a father’s clothes should not fit a son. Never mind that I am bigger than he ever was. I assumed it would hang off of me like a costume on a scarecrow, not unlike how it fit him toward the end.
But it was snug, somehow. It must have shrunk, I thought. After thirty years. Yes, it had shrunk. I put my balled fists into the pockets to pull the shoulders tighter. Each hand encountered unexpected resistance. Before stopping to wonder how that could be, I unclenched my fingers and cupped what felt to be soft paper in one hand and a length of plastic in the other. I brought them out. My wife peered down, and then up to my face and then back down, and all I could manage was, “Oh. That’s sad.”
And I was glad then that my mother had left the room. It was a hospital bracelet, my father’s birthdate faded but visible, and a handful of tissues, which I’d mistaken for paper. They seemed somehow still moist, but I knew it had to be the cold, the ice from the ground and the eaves seeping through the floorboards, through the windows, into our bones, into every forgotten space. It knew of places that we did not. Some of the tissues had dark spots on them, either snot, or phlegm, or blood, and the image of the spinning ambulance lights returned. The memory of waking in the middle of the night to find him leaning over the dining room table, knuckles pressed into the table cloth, ski cap perched on his patchy bald head, and a crumple of bloody tissues strewn about his hands. That had been a December. Or November. It had been cold, but the heat had worked then. He did come home after that, sometime later, better but not healed. It was not something that could be healed, the doctors said. So I left and went back to New Jersey, which I should never have done, and it was in February, another damn February, that I got the call to come back home, immediately, to Memphis.
*
Two days later, my wife was able to fly out, to go see her own mother. We slalomed through the roads in the half-light of dawn, around branches and trees and black ice, but we made it safely to the airport. Then my mother and I did it again, later that same day as the sun finished its own journey, to get to the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception for Saturday Mass.
The church had lost power, like the rest of the neighborhood, but a generator or backup system of some kind fought valiantly to support the heater. Chilly feet and a frosted nose were a small price to pay for God’s grace, and we braved the temperatures without complaint.
The parishioners sat solemnly in the church pews, bathed in the half-light of the afternoon. The Saturday vigil always felt holier. There was less celebration at Saturday Mass, more stillness, a stillness that this time matched the icy streets. There was no socializing in the vestibule. The choir alcove was all empty gloom. I always thought of Saturday churchgoers as older, solitary. Many I assumed were widowed. The church felt hollowed out, and the muffled echoes of the singular bodies hinted at the loss these people had known, of how much of them it had consumed.
The altar servers’ candles served a utilitarian purpose for once. The deacon held aloft a battery-powered lantern, which blasted a harsh, jarring glow into the corners of the church. Its artificial power felt wrong, unnatural. I fought the urge to stop him mid-procession and flip the switch. The afternoon was overcast but a weak light still lumbered through the stained glass circling the nave.
The Mass progressed, my mother at my side, and the sun dipped lower, and it all felt medieval. As if the priest would soon switch over to Latin. We squinted at our missals, attempting to follow along. We mumbled the responses into the flickering pall. When we stood for the gospel, the Deacon read haltingly about Jesus delivering a sermon and then delivering a bulge of fish into Simon’s tearing nets. I could not help but admire the anonymity of this shadowy service. As Simon morphed into a fisher of men, everyone around us gradually grew blurry at the edges. The natural light in the church was fading, and the candles were no match for the encroaching dusk. The dark allowed the parishioners to dissolve into the wooden pews, granting them the merger they coveted.
The Word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
We made it through the homily, and the priest’s Polish accent, which had never been a problem to me before, suddenly grew turbid, impenetrable enough to allow my mind to wander, to allow the words to wash over me, inconsequential. He finished, and paused, and then we stood to recite the Creed.
…and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man.
I bowed my head. We all bowed our heads. My chin touched my chest and my eyes rested on the breast of the blue Yankees jacket, the white N stitched into the white Y. The thin smoke from the church’s candles wafted out to the pews, offering us a whiff of burning wick, pleasant and comforting. With the giant white lettering filling my darkened vision, and the singed air whirling around me, I remembered again. Or I tried to remember, to recollect more fully. To recall sitting in our frozen house as a child, for days on end, reading in the dark by flittering candlelight.
But remembering is not always remembering. Just that morning, before the airport, huddled over grilled coffee and bagels at the dining room table, still bundled in the long underwear, gloves, and ski caps that we had slept in, my mother reminisced about The Ice Storm of ’94. But her remembering stood at odds with mine.
“The ice melted after just a couple days but we didn’t have power for maybe ten,” she told my wife, her cold hands clasped tight around the steaming mug. “We went to a hotel for one night, too. Remember?” she asked me. I did not.
“We weren’t really in the house for very long,” she said. She slurped her coffee. “After the hotel, I took you guys out to the farm with Mama. Out to Jackson. We stayed there for a few days, but your dad stayed here the whole time, until the power came back. He was alone in the dark for a while. You know, that storm was really tough on him.”
*
…who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son…
I stood like a statue in the pew, my hands balled into fists in the pockets of the jacket. They were both now empty, the hospital bracelet safely packed away in my suitcase, the tissues in the trash. One thing preserved, one thing discarded.
My voice recited the words along with everyone else, trying to come to an understanding, like everyone else.
We look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
Amen.
We sat back down on the creaking wood and the offering was collected. Collected by men who floated up the aisle with wicker baskets to pass amongst the ghosts. The cantor launched into song from her dark pulpit.
Photo by Olga Kononenko on Unsplash