As a Lenten commitment — and because I have a little more time with it being the offseason and all – I’m attempting a return to the personal, stream-of-consciousness writing that once yielded some fulfilling work. Finishing an entire piece daily is more than my schedule will permit, but for the moment at least 20 to 30 minutes of my day is spent learning to recapture a voice that I feared might be lost.
Here is the second piece:
Although I prefer warm weather these days, I remember when I wanted nothing more than to be up north in the cold.
It was our second winter in Florida. The novelty of constant warmth from the first winter had faded; in odd defiance of the conditions, I continued to wear sweatshirts as I had in my years in Virginia, often venturing to Tarpon Springs Middle School on 84-degree days with a heavy, navy blue “Carolina Basketball” Champion sweatshirt or an equally thick gray USF sweatshirt. More often than not, I wore polo shirts beneath these and others I possessed. It was a uniform; it was my routine. Only the colors changed from day to day.
I was fine until I boarded the bus to ride back to our neighborhood. The seventh-grade bus ride remains the most dreaded trip of my life, mainly because our driver decided to assign seats, so I was stuck with two hellions I badly misjudged on the first day of school …
(See, when your family sets up shop in a new subdivision and is one of the first to settle there, there’s a ceaseless stream of “new kids” moving into the neighborhood. The bus stop on the first day of seventh grade had more than twice as many kids standing there as it did for the last day of the previous year. I thought to myself, ‘Maybe I’ll get along with some of these newbies because they’re about to go through the same shit I endured the previous year, being uprooted from the friends I knew, the school I always expected to attend, the basketball team I thought I’d make, the life I never wanted to change.’ Within two weeks, these newcomers with whom I was seated stopped trying to be nice and had figured out that I was a geek, a nerd … whatever pejorative you want to apply. The bus driver was unsympathetic to my plight and seemed annoyed that I even mentioned that these deviants had slammed my head into the window on a daily basis for three weeks before discovering that the best way to tip over my apple cart was by drawing on my book covers or ripping paper on which I’d written notes from classes out of my binder, all the while elbowing me every 15 seconds of a 20-minute journey that seemed to last days. Fuck the Torture Twins. Fuck that bus driver, who was assigned to another bus route the following year and one day said “Hello,” and asked how I was, to which I said nothing and kept walking.)
… Stuck in a seat with these imbeciles, stuck with no air conditioning, stuck in the sweatshirt that I was afraid to remove because I thought it would be tossed out the window, and it’s impossible to get a Carolina basketball sweatshirt in the Tampa Bay area in the winter of 1988-89, because this is a decade before every school sells every stitch of clothing on-line. But I wouldn’t change. I was comfortable in these threads. The other kids dressed differently, but I didn’t notice what they were wearing; I knew what I liked and I wore it. I only eschewed the sweatshirts when the morning temperature was forecast to be at least 70 and the high temperature at least 87.
As you might notice, I’ve always been tuned to the weather, which I found rather boring in our part of Florida, save for the threat of hurricanes. When I was younger, I wanted us to get hit. Not wiped out, but just skirted enough to see some wind, some rain, some chatter on The Weather Channel about our home area, rather than someone else’s. Whether it was snow or storms, I wanted something unusual, something noteworthy.
Thursday here in Denver was noteworthy enough, and on a snowy day like that, I’m sidetracked by the weather, even though this snowfall is as unremarkable as a rainy day back in Charlotte. I know it’s been colder than this on this date before; without researching I knew the temperatures were at record cold levels at this time four years ago during the last Winter Olympics (and indeed this was confirmed; it was 11 below four years earlier). I remember this because I couldn’t find my car in the long-term parking lot at DIA; I mis-read and thus mis-noted the lot in which I was parked before heading to Honolulu for the Pro Bowl. There are few things less comfortable than being lost in a sub-zero parking lot without proper winter attire.
But as I recall and cement the details of this day, I begin clicking to a Web site that has been a regular stop of mine for 14 years now: Weather Underground (http://www.wunderground.com). Not so much for the forecasts, but its copious records of conditions going back through my lifetime. Thus, I can tell you the weather for our first date (13 degrees with scattered clouds when I arrived; eight degrees when you tried to locate your building), the morning I left Richmond, Va. for the last time before moving to Tampa (71 degrees and light drizzle) or the day I arrived in Seattle from Tampa (68 degrees on Aug. 19, upon which I blurted to no one in particular, “This feels like winter to me”).
I can also tell you that it snowed in Tarpon Springs on the evening of Dec. 23, 1989, but I didn’t need to research that one; I saw the flakes flying outside my window as I watched a Cleveland Browns-Houston Oilers game and went outside at halftime to throw around a football and pretend I was back in what I then dubbed “a more normal climate.”
So, yes, in my early years in Florida, I did wish I was up north, because most of the time, Florida felt like Hell — and it usually had nothing to do with the temperature.
