Watching

It’s snowing now. We have the first inch or so of what may turn out to be as much as a foot by morning, the first big snow of the year. The snowfall is beautiful, alternately a dense fall of tiny flakes and a sparse fall of great fat flakes that float on the wind. We’ve been following the predictions of this storm since just before Thanksgiving, and now, here it is. This morning the dawn was blood orange colored, and there was a kind of stillness that often comes before a storm, as if the weather was holding its breath. We drove down to Oneonta and it seemed to me that everything was waiting for the storm – although perhaps it was only me waiting. We were safely home before the snow really started coming down. The tips of the grass are still visible, but not for long.

As often happens when I watch snow, I think of Shayne and me watching snow out of the third floor window in the Bronx, praying for a snow day. We shared a big bedroom in that roomy pre-war two bedroom apartment. We divided the room with a chest high bookshelf that abutted the center of the double window on the wall that faced Britton Street, and we both had the heads of our beds near the bookshelf. So we could each sit in bed and look out the window and watch the snow with just the bookcase between us. We couldn’t see each other, but we could both see the snow. And of course, we could talk. We watched the snow stream through the street lights, and watched it pile up on the windowsill and in the street. There wasn’t a lot of traffic on Britton, but when a car went by we could watch its tracks fill with snow and use that speed to predict the closing of school.

I was reading about the “Up” documentaries, that amazing series that filmed a group of twenty Brits every seven years from the time they were seven years old. What is almost certainly the last in the series, 63 Up, is just being released. The working idea of the series was that you could see the destiny of the adults when they were seven. And it made me think of Shayne and me in the Bronx when I was seven and she was nine. Surely we could not have seen how cruelly short her life would be, not living to see 60. But there was a lot you could have guessed about our adulthood from our childhood. Shayne was a passionate and assertive leader even then, and I was happy to follow her lead, to let her initiate the stories about the snow that guided our imaginations. I didn’t have the restlessness of mind or the inventiveness that she had, but I was almost always happy – and I still am. It would not have surprised anyone who knew Shayne at nine that she would have created an amazing organization that touched hundreds of lives.

As in the Up series, there were periods in my life when the person I was at seven seemed to almost disappear. But later in life, nearly all the Up participants returned to the basic qualities they had shown at seven – the basic balances of happiness, curiosity, bravery, kindness and their opposites. Here, on the north side of seventy, I feel a deep kinship with my seven year old self watching the snow fall. If it’s a snow day for schools tomorrow, the Senior Center will be closed too, and I won’t join Aviva and pals there for our weekly Mah Jongg lesson. So that has changed – I’m no longer rooting for a snow day. But the watching feels just the same.