The Snow Apocalypse, Part 2

(The Snow Apocalypse, Part 2)

Time Frame: December 2010

            My freshman year at the university I was told that hoping for a snow day was a waste of time. The school hadn’t had a snow day in over twenty years. So when the sky started to darken and soft flurries began to tumble to the ground everyone expected their prayers for a day off to go unanswered. Most of us just really wanted to get out of tests or quizzes. The end of the semester was just around the corner, which meant that finals were coming up. Which, in turn, meant that all of our professors decided that it was the perfect time to give everyone tests, quizzes, and to make major papers due.

            The last thing any of us wanted to do was study. We would much rather build an igloo colony, which was quickly becoming a favored idea among the students. People had actually started making runs to Walmart to purchase shovels, buckets, and sleds. Coffee was nice and passing classes was nice but the idea of living in an igloo and going inside only to get hot food was even nicer.

            

By the third day of constant snow, we’d gathered a depth of six inches of snow. The idea of a snow day was becoming increasingly realistic. Especially as local schools started shutting down. On that third evening I was laying on my bed and staring out the window of my dorm room, watching a couple people building a snowman in the dying light outside, as my roommate sat on the sofa. She had a horror movie on and her laptop open on her lap. Her fingers were typing away at the key board as she hurried to finish a science paper she had due the next day.

I had an open British Literature book in front of me. The words of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury tales did nothing to keep my interest that evening. I knew I should have been reading it and highlighting things to talk about in class the next day, but I was more fascinated with the frost on the window and the couple building the snowman.

“Frick, have you guys been outside?” one of my and my roommate’s friends walked into our room through our open door. Snow clung to her boots, coat, and brown hair.

“Not since dinner,” my roommate stated, looking up from her laptop.

Our friend shed her wet coat and shoes, “Well don’t go back out. It’s like the freaking ice age out there.” She plopped down on the sofa. “What is this movie?”

My roommate gave her the name as blood trailed down a wall on the television and a girl screamed.

“I know it’s not going to happen, but is it really too much to ask for one snow day?” our friend wondered aloud as my roommate put aside her laptop in favor of watching the movie and chatting with our friend, who was really more her friend than mine. To be honest, she and all of our mutual friends from that year, I hardly ever talk to anymore. The last correspondence we had was when she ‘liked’ something I posted on my social media page. I can’t even recall that last time we actually talked to each other.

Regardless, they were who I hung out with my first semester at the university. It wouldn’t be until January that would meet my best friend and actually start gaining friends that I had things in common with.

As my roommate, our friend, and I chilled in our room that night our other friends slowly joined us. First it was just the girls. Four other girls besides myself and my roommate. Then, as the sky darkened and the hour shifted to one that admitted boys on the hall, the guys joined us. Until eleven that night they all watched horror movies and I tried my best to pretend that I was actually interested in the show with the creepy hauntings and the blood curling screams. I spent a lot of time with my mind wandering though.

Eventually, I silently got up, grabbed my laptop, and logged onto our school website. My English professor had a nasty habit of sending last minute directions for the next day’s class at ungodly hours of the day. I figured I should probably check my school email to see if she had anything to say.

Sure enough, when I logged in, the first message waiting for me was from said professor. I clicked on the email, opened it, and read something that I had to re-read twice before actually believing my eyes.

“Due to class being canceled tomorrow, please read the following pages for next time…”

Class was canceled? Was school canceled?

I clicked out of the email and grinned when I found another unread one waiting for me from the school, announcing that the following day would be a snow day.

“Snow day,” I weakly called out in a false happy tone that was laced with just an edge of genuine excitement. Excitement for the day without classes, fake happiness because I knew the following day would be spent with fake friends.

A loud whoop sounded from the others in my dorm room. They all checked their emails and text messages to find that what I said was true. The cheer they let out when they found out that because of the snow day the boys were allowed in the girls’ dorms (and vice versa) for an extra two hours that night.

I was not elated.

I had to stay up until one in the morning listening to the screams of the damned. It was irritating. I wanted to sleep. I was frustrated because even though we had a day off I had no one real to spend it with and no one around that wouldn’t judge me for wanting to spend the whole day in bed writing.

When I woke up at ten the next day –an ungodly hour by the standards of my roommate but a perfectly reasonable hour to be up by my own –I left the room as quickly and quietly as possible, getting a pillow thrown at me and curses flung my way in the process. All I took with me was my student ID, so I could get food from the cafeteria, and my laptop.

It was far too cold to sit outside and write, plus it was still snowing, but that didn’t stop me from grabbing a seat by the large window in the cafeteria and watching as the first igloo of the desired igloo colony was erected.

I had decided that since snow days were rare on that campus I would savor the one I got. For the record, we received a whole week off from school that year and everyone started calling it the great snow apocalypse of 2010. Every year since then, we had snow days. 2010 broke the school’s streak of no snow days.

As I sat there watching the cafeteria workers go about their jobs and the people outside building igloos, I started to write a story that I never finished. I didn’t know at the time but in that cafeteria, restocking the oranges and refilling the ice in the soda machines, were the people that would come to be my real friends. 

The Snow Apocalypse, Part 1

Time Frame: December 2010

The month was December, the day was a Friday. It was one day into what my freshman friends and I would come to call the Great Snow Apocalypse of 2010. The snow was coming down in soft flurries and the sky was darker than steel wool. Everyone was cold. Not even the dorm heaters could chase away Jack Frost’s nipping. Coco and Coffee was starting to become extensions of the students’ bodies and there were talks of forming an igloo colony. Everyone would leave their dorms looking like fashionable Eskimos and arrive for diner at the cafeteria looking like abominable snowmen.      

At that time I wasn’t working in the cafeteria. I was working at an on camps diner called Land Café (named so because of the building that housed it), so my hours were late and eating dinner with my roommate and friends was a regular occurrence. We’d all just settled in with our plates full of piping hot food and our small white mugs filled with hazelnut flavored coffee when the talk began.

Really, people had been discussing the school skate night for weeks, but that night the talk was especially omnipresent. Reason being, that night was the night. At seven o’clock everyone who was anyone would be piling into cars and driving to Kansas City to go Ice Skating at Crown Center Plaza. I wasn’t big on society or anything that involved socializing but I had a few good friends that had been talking my ear off about the event for weeks. They’d wanted me to call into work. To find someone to take my shift and go skating with them.

Their request was flawed. You see, when everyone at school is going ice skating it is impossible to find someone to take your shift. I had, for a brief amount of time, hoped that Land Café would be closed because there’d be no one on campus to serve, but those hopes were dashed when a sign –reading, “Note: Land Café will remain open despite skate night.” –was placed above where all workers clocked in. I was probably the only person not planning on going to the event. Well, me and this other girl that I was to work with that night. Or so I thought.

Later that night, as my friends all readied to leave in cute little outfits with scarves and matching gloves, and little hats with pompoms on top, I was slipping on my pink pea coat and cursing the weather for being so horrid. I was just stepping out my dorm door, popping my coat’s collar up to help protect against the blowing snow, when I got a call from my friend Ally.

Ally was two classes higher than me -making her a Junior- and was studying nursing. She was a nice girl with hair as light as moonbeams and eyes the color of ice. We met in our New Testament class, at a pizza party our professor threw for extra credit and social reasons. He was a cool professor. Outside of having to memorize the beatitudes, in Matthew 5, he was pretty laid back.

Anyway, I digress. That night, when Ally called, I was heading out my dorm door to work a shift I absolutely loathed. I hated working at the café. I’m not exaggerating either. I really detested the place. I’d been considering quitting but I didn’t really want to call my parents up and tell them that I left a paying job.

“Hey, Andy, are you sure you don’t want to come skating tonight?” Ally tried to persuade me. “It’s only $5 to get in and there’s supposed to be hot coco.”

“I have to work,” I reluctantly ground out.

“I know,” her voice was defeated. “Well, if for some reason you suddenly don’t have to, I’m not leaving campus for another half hour. Give me a call.”

Ally wasn’t about to outright suggest that I skip work and I wasn’t about to just do that. So, I ended the call and continued to trek across campus in the cold. The building the diner was in wasn’t that far away, only a two minute walk from the dorm, but it was long enough and the weather was frightful enough that by the time I reached the building my face was frozen. At that point I was actually looking forward to getting inside, even if it was just for the sake of warming up. 

When I reached for the door I expected it to be unlocked. It was supposed to be. The other girl I was to be working with had the keys and she was supposed to unlock the door when she got there every night. I pulled on the door, it didn’t budge.

I thought that maybe she was just running late, so I waited around for a good ten minutes before I tried calling her. Her phone went to voicemail…twice.

I couldn’t get into the building. I was freezing. I tried calling our head boss and she didn’t answer. I didn’t really want to go back to an empty dorm building either, so it was then that I made a choice. For the first and only time, I decided to pull something that some of my other coworkers were famous for. Despite it being frowned upon, I made a choice to skip work.

“Hey, Ally!” I spoke into the phone with a grin. If I couldn’t get into the building to work anyway I might as well spend the time doing something I wanted to. “Have you left yet?”

In retrospect, it probably wasn’t the brightest decision I’ve ever made.

“No. I’m in the parking lot by the caf. You coming?”

“Yep?”

“Did you find a cover?”

“No.”

            

“Okay! See you in a few!”

            I only had to cross a small street before I reached Ally’s car. She and a boy she’d been talking to from one of her other classes was there. She’d mentioned the guy before; said that he was cute and that she kind of wished something would develop between them. As far as I knew, though, nothing had.

           “Andy, this is Sky,” Ally introduced the dark brown haired guy. “He was supposed to be going to skate night with some friends but they ditched him. So, he’ll be riding with us.”

            “Cool,” I said and greeted the guy.

            That night, the three of us had a blast. We went ice skating, drank hot coco, ran through blue colored fountains, and hung out in a Christmas themed playground. To be honest, it was the first time since starting the university that I had felt fine.

            No anxiety or worry could touch me that night. I had one of my all too rare moments when I just threw all my cares to the wind and stuck my tongue out at them. Nothing could bring me down. Not how creepy it was being in a parking garage at night for the first time, not how I fell on my butt several times that night skating, not even thoughts about how my boss would react come morning.

            In fact, let me tell you a little secret. If anyone had shown up at the café that night, which I’m pretty sure no one did, there would have been no one there to serve them. Turns out I wasn’t the only one who’d wanted to go skating. That other girl I was supposed to work with was at the rink that night. She looked at me, I looked at her, and we went separate ways. We didn’t really like each other. We hadn’t since we’d first met and we still don’t to this day, but that night we had a mutual understanding. That night we didn’t want to be stuck in some corner of the Land building, waiting on no one but the air. We didn’t want to be cooking pretzels and listening to the blaring TV that was mounted to the red wall. What we wanted was to be a part of the student body. We wanted to be a part of society.

           Yes, in retrospect skipping work probably wasn’t the best idea –though I never did hear anything from my boss about it –but over all, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. You see, sometimes in life we get too caught up in the world around us. We get too caught up in our routines. Some days it feels like our only purpose is to wake up, fulfill our responsibilities, go to bed, and repeat it all over again the next day, but there’s more to life than that.

            I’ve probably said this before, but participation is not just something you do to pass a class. Participation is something you do to live.

            I was never any good at participating in class. I’ve had more than my share of teachers ride my case about needing to talk more. There was even a time that I would say that I wasn’t any good at participating in life, but things change. The university and the friends I made there changed me.

            Skating at Crown Center Plaza changed me. It was the first real experience I had with the student body that didn’t leave me second guessing myself. Outside of welcome week (freshman orientation) –which was sort of forced on me –and the pizza party my New Testament professor hosted, Skate Night was the first time I really participated in campus life.

     

       Let me tell you this. All those responsibilities you have, all those papers that won’t write themselves and all those paychecks you’re trying to earn, won’t matter in the scheme of things. I look back at my time at the university and I can really only remember a few things that I bought with my paychecks. I can only really remember a few paper topics I wrote on and a few math tests that I didn’t do particularly horrible on. What I remember most are the moments I spent participating in life.

           

Textbooks can only teach you so much. I had a professor, the only professor I was ever on bad terms with, that once said, “No matter how much an author writes about reality, and no matter how real they make it, they will still never achieve reality.” He and I didn’t agree on many things, but on that statement we can agree.

            Textbooks, novels, they’re all great sources of knowledge. They all help us learn what it means to be human and why humans do the things they do, but in order to really understand humanity you have to be a part of it.

            There’s a saying that goes, “Everybody dies but not everyone lives.” I’d encourage you all to live. To take some time and to have a rare ‘forget-it-all’ moment. All those responsibilities you have will still be there when you get back. Take a step back, throw those papers to the wind, and say, “Tomorrow, world, I am yours, but tonight…tonight I am living.”

            You never know what can happen in the span of one night. Choosing to spend it with the right people can change your entire future. That night at the skate rink, Ally met her husband. She and Sky got married two years later and they now have a set of adorable twins. They live in Alaska now. He’s in the military. She does nursing. Because of that night, because she made the choice to give him a ride to Kansas City, he ended the night by asking her out on their first date.

            

Now, I didn’t find my prince charming at that skate rink, but I found something just as important. My spirit.