Everyone has a tale to tell - of snow pluffing off the roof of a SEPTA station, missing a dashing commuter by a hair; of a co-worker on I-95 zigging to avoid an accident and nearly plowing the guardrail; of slips and snapped tree limbs; of a mother getting cabin fever in a house of snowbound kids.
After a rather weather-less autumn, early January has been spinning the dial: snowy days followed by sunshiny ones. Then snow, again. Sleet, gloom, ice, rain. It's the postman's slogan run amok.
Near 12th and newly completed Vine, a soggy sleeping bag and empty liquor bottle mark an abandoned outpost. In Suburban Station, there's a hankering for hot chocolate. The weather has turned back the clock; the times are simpler, tougher. The pipes break. The car conks.
And war looms.
People collect in knots, in the corner bars, in front of TVs, in the office. The footwear has equalized them: Pin-striped lawyers in hiking boots, heavy-treaded executives, polished above the cuffs, scuffed below. They seem wearier somehow, drained, anxious, fatalistic, yet comforted by the solidarity that the weather and the war have conferred.
It is not that they are suddenly of one mind. It is that shared experience - and common vulnerability - seem to be binding them closer: a friend's brother sent to a tank recon unit in the Saudi desert, an aging mother stuck without heat.
It is the stupid, helpless feeling of an out-of-control skid.
Couldn't they cancel the war on account of snow?
