I spent my formative years at Glenbrook Elementary School. Every morning, first thing, I prayed for a snow day. Even in the fall and spring.
When I was little, I sometimes used to slug room to room through the house, then dramatically tell my mother, “I’m boring.” What I meant to say was that I was bored. Poor bored me.
I’ve since come to the conclusion that “boring” and “bored” are the same thing.
I want a snow day. I want to snowshoe through the streets and crack open Bleak House for the zillionth time and upgrade my iPhone and prep business info for my taxes and dust my shelves and scan more photos and clean out my email inbox and flip through a growing stack of Poets & Writers and make French onion soup.
And work on my novel. And write out a recent dream sequence wherein I welcomed into my home some guy who was apparently my boyfriend, along with a woman he introduced to me as his girlfriend. “It’s lovely to meet you,” I said to my boyfriend’s girlfriend in the dream, and I proceeded to make sure they had plenty to eat and drink as they, in turn, discussed their mutual desire to have six babies.
And I want to read The Tiger’s Wife and finish The Sense of an Ending and reflect on the Old Emersonian Nonsense. And think some more about the meaning of “bountiful,” a word that appeared to me in another dream. And see Zero Dark Thirty again and write fan mail to Kathryn Bigelow for being so awesome. And read and write some more and more.
When I was a little older than little, I’d listen to my bedroom radio on pre-dawn snowy mornings, breath held, eyes shut tight, praying I could will my school, Glenbrook Elementary, to close. Two-hour delay, you big tease, I wanted the entirety of the entire day. And when I got it, when I got what I wanted most in the world — well, it was better than all the gifts under a Scotch Pine or a Six Flags Saturday or a Lake Michigan Sunday or a seance-filled birthday sleepover.
Snow day, how I’ve always loved you.
