No One Asked Me But…(December 29, 2010)

By Dr. Larry Moses

No one asked me but…As of this writing (12/22/10) it has been raining for two days now, and the weatherman says we can expect rain for at least one more day. Thanks to the fact that the people who built my neighborhood got a zone variance allowing the streets to be constructed outside code, I now own half of a riverbed that is dry most of the time. However, at this moment, the road in front of my house once again looks like Overton Landing before the lake went dry. Shortly I will have to turn away Utah boaters.

The rain is welcomed, in one sense, for I have stopped watering my lawn. That is the beauty of rough Bermuda grass, when the temperature drops below eighty degrees it goes dormant, and I can pretend I really care about water conservation. I know as soon as the temperature reaches eighty degrees, I can pour water on it, and the lawn will be green again.

I am very much like the Bermuda grass that adorns my lawn. The temperature dips below eighty, and I too go dormant.

I have been cold for the last month. I sit here typing this with a sweatshirt on, and the thermostat reading 71 degrees, but I think it is conspiracy; it is probably Obama’s fault. I have been told, due to global warming, the old 20 degrees is the new 70 degrees.

I have been watching the snow reports from the Midwest, where I spent the first twenty years of my life, and remember why I did not go back there after finishing college in Logan, Utah.

I must admit I did work one year in Idaho Falls where I fought the snow and cold. However, at that time I had not been exposed to the benefits of the great temperatures available in southern Nevada. It is much easier to suffer the cold when you have never known the pleasures of warmth.

Nearly fifty years ago I moved to Las Vegas to teach school, and I have been out of the snow and into the heat ever since. I go back to Iowa only when the weather is good, which is generally on June 3, from 11:00 am to 2:00 pm. Other than that, it is either too cold or too hot and humid.

There is some merit to the dry heat statement. When people begin to wax poetic about a white Christmas and the virtue of a cozy fire roasting chestnuts, I begin to think they need to be committed. I never dream of a white Christmas, that would be my nightmare.

I watched the Minnesota Vikings and the Chicago Bears play on Monday night football in a driving snowstorm and in temperatures near zero. As the camera spanned the crowd, I came to realize how Minnesota came to elect Al Franken to the House of Representative and Jesse Venture as their governor: Brain Freeze. Thousands of those idiots were in the stands freezing as they threw snowballs at each other.

Minnesota sports the longest life span of any state in the Union, I can also explain that. Every winter Minnesotans go into hibernation, broken only when they lumber out of their caves to watch the Vikings play. It does not matter whether or not the groundhog sees his shadow, the people in Minnesota know they still have a lifetime of cold ahead of them. Actually, they look forward to the cold, as that is all that kills off the mosquito infestation that hits them during their day and a half of summer each year.

I know there are those of you who revel in this cold weather, and are glad to see the clouds and rain, but for me it only serves as a reminder of the weeks on end, when growing up in Iowa, I saw no sun. Then when the sun did come out, you went snow blind from the reflection off the snow. The only thing that saved one’s eyesight was many people burned coal in those days, and in a matter of hours, the snow was black with soot. The environmentalist drove the coal burning furnace into extinction, and now that relief is not available.

The house we lived in by the airport was heated with coal. The cinders were used to fill the dirt drive way.

When we moved to the city in 1948, our house was new, and we heated with fuel oil, and we had a concrete driveway, but the old homes on our street still used coal. Those homes where easy to detect from the black smoke boiling from their chimneys.

I am sorry, but I have no great memories of a white Christmas. I remember anxiously going out in the new snow to play and within minutes, my hands were cold, my feet frozen, and I was crying to be let back in the house. While my brothers and sisters where playing duck, duck, goose, I was in the garage trying to get near the motor of the car hoping for some heat. When my brothers and sisters made snow forts for snowball wars, I volunteered to stay in the house and run the command center.

My mother was my worst enemy for she would bundle me up and throw me out of the house where I would be met by a barrage of snowballs. You have never known joy until you have had your face washed with snow as your older brother convulsed with demonic laughter. I spent a lot of time crying, then my tears would freeze, and my nose would run. Wahoo, what fun.

My friends from Colorado speak of childhood joys of snow sports like skiing. Iowa does not have hills large enough to ski on, only large enough to make it impossible for a car to crest.

The one advantage of a family of seven kids was my father never needed to put sand bags in the trunk of the car; he had seven kids stacked one on another in the back seat. We could go anywhere with that kind of traction. We could tell how bad the snowstorm was by how many kids dad took with him when he went to the store. If all seven were required, we knew it was a bad storm. All I can say is I am dreaming of sunshine and heat and if I do not get it, I am staying inside and hoping to turn up the thermostat.

Thought of the week… A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.

– Carl Reiner