O Day Full of Grace

I remember snow days.

You’d catch wind of a rumor over lunch the day before. We didn’t have nearly as much internet back then, so this was third-hand from what Dane Espegard heard on his parents’ car radio that morning on the way to school. There was a forecast. High winds, an overnight chill, a chance of precipitation—two, three, maybe even four-to-five inches.

That night, you’d beg to stay up and watch the late local news all the way to the end, for as long as the tickertape list of school districts crawled across the bottom of the screen. Gretna…Waverly…Hickman…Omaha (Omaha always canceled early—it was so unfair)…then Lincoln parochial schools…Lincoln Lutheran…Lincoln Christian...

But in the end, you knew you were asking too much. The Superintendent of Lincoln Public Schools was always, always stern in these matters. He’d wait overnight to let the salting trucks and snowplows do their work, before making the call. So you went to bed, knowing that your fate would be decided at some obscure hour in the morning while you were asleep. Before you lay down, you’d press your nose to the cold window, trying to discern in the dark how heavy was the snow. Sleep took you as you lay listening to the wind blow across the siding.

Then it was six fifteen, a.m., still dark, and you could hear muffled footsteps coming down the carpeted hallway. You saw the shadow of the bedroom door swing silently open and—it being the natural instinct of children to pretend they are asleep, that they observe less than they do—you shut your eyes and tried to slow down, even out your breathing.

The footsteps came toward you, softly—as softly as they could for that hour of the morning—and your mother’s hand touched your shoulder. Softly, softly, she nudged you, called your name. You waited until the third call, the third nudge, before you rolled over and pretended to emerge from a stupor.

Then you waited. It could be good news or bad news. It was either an early wake-up call because the sidewalks would be slower and the front step needed to be shoveled, or else…

And it was! It was! It was! Oh, so true! So real! Go back to sleep, she said, they’ve canceled school!

Then came the best moment of all. Your mother left the room, and you lay there in the dark, your heart was pattering a hundred-and-sixty per minute, but all you had to do was wait another moment, and then…

Slumber, heavy slumber, warm and dark, returned to you. You nestled back into the cocoon of your blankets, and thought of the snow forts you would dig out of the drifts later that morning, the gear—the boots, the overall snowpants, the heavy winter jacket, gloves, hat, scarf that would grow damp with frozen breath crystals—the hot cocoa and marshmallows, the T.V. show you’d watch in the afternoon. All of that was to come. It was all there waiting for you, and all you had to do was go to sleep to get there, warm and so happy.

Snow days were like grace—they were grace. Completely undeserved, completely unexpected, completely wonderful.

Calvin's Dad

My parents were not great censors of literature when my sisters and I were growing up, but they drew a line at the Berenstein Bears books. There was nothing wrong with the stories themselves, they told us; the problem was Papa Bear. You may recall Papa. He was the overall-clad grizzly who represented an unfortunately typical depiction of Dad: the good-natured but clueless bumbler whose patriarchal reign is propped up by a competent wife and tolerated by children who are really the cleverest ones of all. Fathers were patronized as idiots enough by pop culture, my parents reasoned, for them to add willfully add another wink with our picture books.

I had an argument recently with a friend who criticized Calvin's parents as being too sarcastic. Her description was accurate to a point, particularly when it comes to Calvin's dad: He can be droll; sometimes openly,and sometimes over his son's head (see above).

To my mind a little dark humor is not an unhealthy response to the exasperation that comes with a kid like Calvin:But even more to the point, to criticize dad's sarcasm is to overlook one of the real delightful--and encouraging--things about his character: He's smart. He's a man with a sound enough ear and a nimble enough mind for irony. He's thoughtful, disciplined, and unbothered by the fact that he's not cool. In short, he's a real grown-up, a man who knows he's a man. He may not be perfect, but on the spectrum from Homer Simpson to Atticus Finch, he's a lot closer to the latter.