The Winter that Won't Let Go

Like the houses that wont sell and the economy that wont take off and the politics that wont get out of Park we now have the winter that wont let go. At least in Chicago. We have gone through hell. Thirty below. Forty below. Days on end of snow. Frozen wasteland. And by now we usually get some relief. It is almost April. But not to be. We woke up this morning to eighteen degrees. Frost on the windows with no end in sight.

And you really cant help but connect the dots. Our age is one of stagnation. People frozen in their homes in their jobs in their marriages.It is almost like America as a whole has hit middle age. A strange thought for a country that prides itself on being young. America now is one big waiting game it would seem. Waiting for retirement. Waiting for a job. Waiting to sell. And then there is the weather.

The slogging through it psychology of winter is a perfect metaphor for our time. We slog through to better times. Like the spring it must be there after this long dark winter. We can feel it in the sun now. We can feel it in the light that is now Daylight Savings Time. Funny how that extra hour means nothing when you cant go outside.

So we wait for winter to lose her grip. She is a real bitch this time. They are calling for snow tomorrow.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

Driving Through the Blizzard of 2011

The blizzard in Chicago assures you that you will be going nowhere. But you push it anyway and end up being the last man out of the coffee house that every sensible person left hours ago. Didn't you hear? Sixteen inches! Worst storm in history! Yeah Yeah Yeah. Let me finish this scene and I'll be along. But you do notice you can't see out the windows anymore and even the toothless guy in the zip up suit guys at Jiffy Lube wear looks concerned. She's going to be a doozie he says nodding. You wonder where he has to go because you can't stay in Starbucks forever. Mr. Starbucks the revolutionary studying theology goes out the door and comes back in giving up on the smoke. It's getting bad he declares to the toothless guy in the zoot suit and the writer in the scarf balancing the laptop. Morons I'm sure.

So head it home. The SUV can handle this. But where are all the cars and why are the only cars out off the road? Why is the guy in the middle of the road with his flashers on the hill? Could it be he cant get up the hill occurs to you as you rumble past. But now things are getting bad. You just cant see. The world has turned white like one of those car washes that freaks you out with blankets of suds and the claustrophobia grabs you by the throat making you consider driving through the car wash door to get the hell out of there. But there is no door to drive through because you cant tell up from down or right from left. You instantly win the Sarah Palin award for pushing everything once again to the limit. DUMMMMMMMMB

But like a pilot flying through clouds you guess where the road should be. You have driven it a million times and there are dim lights pulsing through the white haze that must be a car in front of you so you key on that. Keep the nose on the dim lights. You are now a sailor aiming for a lighthouse in the far distance. The light pulses and moves away and you push down on the accelerator. Lose that light and you really are doomed. So you inch along passing more cars off the road with misty figures standing by the side. You cant stop. If you stop the guy behind you who is also blind will ram right into you. Oh and by the way, you didn't fill up and your CHECK GAUGE light has just come on.

Now you are risking your life for coffee in Starbucks and reading an extra article in the New York Times. Run out of gas on this desolate road and you are just done. Oh and the cellphone needs charging too. Perfect. The complete moron. You really should call up to Alaska and ask if they need a campaign manager because you have out Palined the Palinator. Now that the road has vanished and the wheel is vibrating in your hand because there is just as much as snow on the road as off the road you consider your fate. Snowbank death. Turned over vehicle death. Frozen death. The wheels do not like the snow pushing back and of course you have no idea where you are and the gas gauge is screaming you are on fumes. You simply don't have any landmarks anymore and so you don't know how far you have to go.

You pick up the cellphone blinking BATTERY LOW. You dial the wife. Might as well do a Scott and Amundsen thing with a final I love you. They will bring that up at your funeral. If only he left the Starbucks earlier. Every one will shake their head: moron. You press send and the phone shuts down. No final epistle: I believe I could have made it if I put another mile behind me. So you are alone in your folly. Moron Moron Moron. The blinding howling wind taunts you in your capsule. You give in to the inevitable sputtering engine that is making strange noises. Then...like Shackleton's sighting of the whaling station after being lost for two years...the light appears.

That is the light on the corner of the road to your neighborhood. LAND HO! You knew you could do it! You turn in and glide down toward your home, cheating death, cheating the great blizzard of 2011. Sarah Palin will have to find another man. You pull into your garage and wait until the door is safely down and you sit contemplating the cosmos and your small place in it. Moron you mutter.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off soon

Gettting Hemingway's Crib

You assume people know who Ernest Hemingway is."Wasn't he that writer guy?" A biography comes on television and he pops up in old films of movie stars or on a safari, but that time is past--almost seventy years past and the century is almost gone. It's become passe to be a Hemingway fan. The biggest of the Dead White Male writers; a big man stomping around shooting bears and catching swordfish off the coast of Florida. Even his character has become old fashioned. I mean, really, the man of adventure, the swashbuckler of letters--in the twentieth century? I don't think so. Maybe Indiana Jones trying to fly around the world in his balloon, but a real man of action--it must have been a movie character.

So, you clear all that away and all we are left with is his writing. But even that gets tangled up in the current climate of "oh come on...tell us what really happened!" Fiction itself is now subjected to the same standards as nonfiction. Suspension of belief sounds good, but it really doesn't occur. How does fiction compare to reality is the new standard. Dare to put some poetry in there and people become venomous. So what is the reality of Ernest Hemingway's fiction? What is left that we can say, yes, this actually happened--or is it all just mannered, quaint, stories of the early century.

I had an odd task a few years back. I was asked by the Ernest Hemingway Foundation to go get his bed up in Michigan. The bed was in the possession of a nephew in the town of Petosky. This is the site of the Hemingway cottage on Walloon lake and the setting of many of his short stories; Big Two Hearted River, Up In Michigan, Indian Camp, Three Day Blow to name a few. Hemingway spent his summers up there, hunting ,fishing, camping and gathering fodder. I chose the weekend of the New Year to go.

Petosky was snow covered when I arrived. I drove down the winding road leading back to the Hemingway cottage. There were million dollar homes on the road now. I found out Petosky is a very hot vacation spot. I reached his nephews residence and picked up the bed and a few old chairs. The bed was a youth bed, one Ernest was said to have slept in. But there was nothing extraordinary, no markings of genius. Just wood painted a faded white with a rusty mattress spring. I then drove back down the road to the Hemingway cottage. The cottage is long and white with aluminum siding. Not very rustic. Not Hemingway at all

I plowed around in the snow that was up to my thighs, looking around the porch and glancing into some of the windows. Inside it looked like a cottage, wood floors and walls. A fireplace. I looked out to Walloon lake frozen and silent. The few flakes turned heavy just then and the dark clouds overhead seemed to break open. A wind came down and in minutes the air was rent with snow. I struggled back to my car and could hear the whistling of the storm. It was ferocious. I could not see and I turned at the car door. It was a blizzard. The cottage was no longer visible. I had never seen a storm like this before. Storms came up and you went inside, but I couldn't see my hand in front of my face.

The car wheels spun as I tried to get out of the snow. I kept thinking the storm would pass. I got back out of the car and started down the road, thinking I would see someone who could help me out. The wind roared through the trees and I thought of A Three Day Blow, then the road of pines the girl and the man walked down in Up In Michigan. I trudged on thinking of the lone camper in Big Two Hearted River and how he saw no one for days and the utter loneliness of the landscape. There were no houses anymore, just snow and the forest and I wondered if I might be in danger. I turned back with the panicked, quick feeling inside and returned to the car.

I sat and waited. It was all I could do. The snow slowly covered the car and I sat with Ernest Hemingway's bed on the side of a road he had walked as a boy. That weekend the worst blizzard in twenty years hit the Midwest. Fifteen people died and there was a hundred car pile up on the expressway. Indiana was declared a disaster area and Chicago nearly had to shut down. It took me two days to get home.

I dropped off the bed at his birthplace in Oak Park and it was then I realized who was fooling who. In the darkness of the parlor of his home, with the storm still raging outside, I realized he wrote of the world as he saw it-as it still is-- uncertain, dangerous, requiring courage along the lines of an adventurer to face it. We sit in our smug reality of bits and bytes, thinking we know the world, we know reality. Maybe we are the ones living in fiction now.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

Ornaments

We took our Christmas tree down last night. Some would say it is a late for that. The tree should have been down by now. But of course we like to put off the truth of the holidays end. We are all back to work after all and Christmas is packed away with all the other stuff of family life. But one can not help but think of the fading moment as the ornaments go back into tinsel strewn boxes. Sad that those candles and snowmen and shiny globes of cheer should not see the light of day for another year. Some feel a relief. There is no more work of the parent and life resumes it's regularity. For the rest of us it is the door to childhood closed once again. If Christmas is for children then we are allowed into their world only at Christmas. But we are older and those ornaments stand now as memories of past Christmas and people we have lost and people we no longer see. We remember them for a moment as we take out a particular ornament and hold it, flashing back to a different time when a first snow and the smell of a fire stood for so much more. This is a hard thing to get your hands around without drifting into sentimentality. But there is that moment in the attic when the boxes are laid to rest and you turn by the door. The brown cartons are stacked in the gloom and you pause, knowing then you are just a little bit older, maybe a little further away.