A couple of months ago, I wrote about a bad case of precipitation envy.
As six feet of snow fell near Buffalo, I longed for a little of that spectacle. In Pompey, we had a dusting. I cleared the driveway with a hairdryer. And while I know a monster storm can be tragic, I crave the thrill of the ordeal.
Lord knows we get snow. It just comes two or three inches at a time, day after day after week after month. No drama. No stories of neighbors banding together to shovel the driveway of the pregnant woman on the street. No star defensive end Mario Williams using his own personal front-end loader to clear the driveway of Hall of Fame quarterback Jim Kelly.
(Apparently, when you have a $100 million NFL contract, and particularly if you’re coming off an ugly split with your fiancé and a bitter controversy over who gets the engagement ring, you go out and buy yourself something the next girlfriend won’t want to keep: a front-end loader. Who knew?)
For heaven’s sake, how many years did Doug Marrone coach at SU without helping free a nurse’s car from a snow bank? He barely made it a season and a half in Buffalo.
Then on Sunday, as if the weather gods were taunting me, one of my daughters returned to college in New York City and immediately rushed to Trader Joe’s to stock up for the biggest, baddest snowstorm to hit anywhere, anytime. It would be Big News because … well, it’s New York City. And we’d get story after heroic story about otherwise cold and distant New Yorkers becoming almost Midwestern as they coped.
But New York missed the drama, too. They learned what we know well in Syracuse: Sometimes the forecast is worse than the reality.
So the Big News blew up the coast, to New England. They have all the luck. They’ll be inside, sitting out the storm aftermath, watching their team in the Super Bowl. Bet they win, too.
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Larry Dietrich is the editor-in-chief at the Syracuse New Times.
