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.