Snow Day

by Billy Coffey

  “I know. It stinks. But Mom’s cold and she says I gotta go home with her.”

  “But you came here with us,” one of the other boys said. “Why can’t she just go home and you can leave with us?”

  Uh-oh. Mikey didn’t see that one coming.

  “Well, my dad’s coming home soon, and I have to get my chores done.” It was quick thinking, and it was brilliant. All of the boys knew about chores and the need to have them done before their fathers got home.

  “Okay,” the leader said. “Well, we’re sticking around here for a while. Maybe you can come back with us tomorrow.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sure thing.”

  Mikey left them and started toward the parking lot. His mother was already waiting in her minivan, the kind equipped with enough safety features to repel anything this side of an asteroid.

  “Come on, dear,” she called, trying to coax Mikey along. Victory was within her grasp. She had done her job as a parent—she had kept her child safe. To her, that was all that mattered. It was good that her son was afraid. Fear kept him from danger. From… risk. That’s what going down that hill was to her—a risk. And it was the sort of risk that many risks were—unnecessary.

  But I noticed that Mikey seemed to be holding a different view of things. He was caught between the fears his mother had helped to instill in him, that need to be safe, and his desire to break free of them. He knew that if he went down that hill and his mother was right, he may not live to see another day. But he also knew that if he didn’t go down, if he did live to see another day, then so would all of his fears.

  Mikey stopped.

  His mother, still smiling, waved him over to her. “Come on, honey,” she said. “It’s cold. We don’t want you to get sick.”

  Mikey shook his head.

  “Mikey,” she said again, “please don’t play games. Let’s go home.”

  Again—no.

  “Michael Lee Pannill, you get in this van right now!” It was loud. It was forceful. Mikey’s mom was not playing around anymore. She was losing control of herself, of her son, of the whole situation.

  Mikey picked up his sled and ran toward the hill. His friends, transfixed, watched in shock as he flopped down on the sled belly-first and disappeared over the edge.

  “Mikey!” his mother screamed. “Oh Jesus, help me, help my boy!” She flung the van door open and jumped out, tangling herself in the seat belt she had forgotten to unbuckle. She jerked and pulled and twisted herself free, then sprinted toward the boys. “Mikey! Mikey!”

  His friends stood frozen, mouths agape. I realized then why. They had all gone down sitting on their sleds. Even the leader. But Mikey had gone down headfirst. No one did that. It was too bold. Too… risky.

  I stepped toward them, reached into my pocket for my cell phone, dialed 911, and kept my thumb hovering just above the Send key. Someone was going to need medical attention very soon. Maybe Mikey. Probably his mother.

  “Aaahhh!” Mikey screamed. I didn’t know if that was the sound of fear or joy. Then he screamed, “Mommy!” and I knew. Fear.

  Then things got a little worse. Halfway down Mikey hit one of those rocks the leader had warned him about. The sled bucked about four inches into the air. When it came down, Mikey wasn’t on it. He tumbled the rest of the way down the hill, then came to a stop when he fell into a bunch of freshly made snow angels.

  “Oh Jesus please let my boy be okay!” his mother cried. She launched herself down the hill after him, and to the utter amazement of both the boys and me, she made it all the way down to the bottom without falling herself.

  Mikey was still there, sprawled out in the snow.

  Laughing.

  His mother reached the bottom and nearly pounced on top of him. She checked him over with the skill of an emergency room doctor. Fear turning to rage, she grabbed his arm, jerked him to his feet, and started pulling him and his sled—which, she said, he would “never, ever get on again!”—back up the hill.

  “That was so awesome!” It was the leader, and it was the ultimate compliment.

  “Did you see how fast he went?” said one boy.

  “I thought he was just scared,” said another. “But I guess he was tellin’ the truth all along. He just wanted us to pack the snow down for him.”

  Mikey’s mother was still in shock when they crested the hill. Things had been going so well, but she had failed. It was her job to watch over him. The world was a bad place, eager to devour someone so young and frail and innocent.

  But if she was wearing a look of defeat, her son was wearing one of triumph. There Mikey was, being dragged by the arm to the van and sure punishment, and he was laughing. He had done it. He had faced down a fear. It was one of many, to be sure, but it was one and it was the first and maybe the rest wouldn’t be so hard now.

  He had learned one of life’s most valuable lessons: the fear of a thing is usually much more frightening than the thing itself. He learned that playing it safe wasn’t always necessarily the best thing. Sometimes you had to cast your bread upon the waters. Sometimes you had to risk it. You had to get bumped and bruised. Sometimes you had to fall. But that was okay, because Mikey found out the angels would catch him when he fell.

  He knew all of that then. It was written on his face and imprinted in his heart. He might have gone down that hill as Mikey the little boy, screaming in terror for his mommy, but he came back up it as Michael Lee Pannill, young man.

  As the two neared Mikey’s group of friends, they tried to rush him with compliments. Mikey’s mother would have none of that, though. She whisked him away and into the parking lot.

  “You didn’t even have your mouthpiece in, Michael,” she scolded. “I told you to make sure you put it in before you did something stupid like that. You could have lost your teeth playing that stunt.”

  “I’m glad I didn’t put it in,” Michael managed to say as they walked toward me. “If I had, I wouldn’t have been able to laugh.”

  As they passed me, I quietly extended my hand. Michael bumped my fist with his. I winked. He smiled.

  Good thing his mother didn’t see.

  16

  Eleanor’s Story

  Traffic had been practically nonexistent in that part of the neighborhood since I had begun my walk. What little there was had been concentrated down at the church, nearer the main road. All of which made the sound of the diesel engine coming from behind seem all the more loud and out of place. I stepped closer to the side of the street and turned to see what was coming.

  Around the corner came the familiar sight of a UPS truck. It zigged and zagged along the slick road, desperately trying to make progress up the slight but steady incline that led to the houses near the edge of the woods. The driver zoomed past while I was still facing him, sending a spray of dirty mist that engulfed me, then pulled over to a house just up ahead.

  The normal urgency and economy of movement that is associated with your average UPS driver seemed to be absent from this one. There was no sudden shot out of the side door with package in hand. There was no Olympic-worthy speed walk up the driveway to the front door, no quick ring of the bell, and no sprint back to head off toward the next delivery. This driver was instead resigned to his fate. He lumbered. He labored. He strolled. Up the driveway with package in hand, he rang the bell twice for good measure.

  And then waited.

  The sight almost stopped me cold. I had never seen a UPS driver wait at the door of someone’s house. It seemed so… unnatural. These were, after all, people whose daily routine consisted of constant motion. I then thought that perhaps the package he was carrying required the signature of the recipient. Yes. Had to be it.

  But it wasn’t.

  The front door opened before he could glance away from it. Out stepped an elegant older woman whose smile seemed as natural as the curls in her hair. She greeted the driver and took her package. Without even a glance at the box, she placed it inside the door and turned her attention back
to him. Strange, I thought, that someone would receive a box and not bother to at least take a look at it. The driver did not ask for a signature. Instead, he appeared to be hanging around just for the conversation. The delivery took so long that by the time he had said his good-byes and made it back to the truck, stopping for a quick smoke break, I was walking past.

  “How ya doin’?” I asked.

  “Good,” he said. He eyed my muddy coat and muddier face. “What the world happened to you?”

  “Truck got me,” I said, and nothing more.

  “Everybody’s in a hurry these days,” he answered, shaking his head and taking a long drag from his cigarette.

  I nodded and said, “Rough day to be out delivering packages,” through a cloud of secondhand smoke.

  “You got that right. No snow days for us, especially at this time of the year.”

  “I bet,” I answered, suddenly very thankful that I was not a UPS driver. “I guess somebody’s gotta play Santa, right?”

  “That’s me, jolly Saint Brent,” he laughed. He paused, then waved his Marlboro Light toward the ranch house he had just visited. “That lady there? I’m Santa to her all year long. I’m by here two, maybe three times a week. Every week.”

  I whistled. “Wow. Sounds like someone needs a hobby.”

  “She’s got one,” he said. “She buys stuff.”

  “Well, I guess I can think of worse ways to spend your time.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.” There was a bit of mystery in his words, a hint that there was more to what he said and he wouldn’t mind sharing it with a little prodding on my part.

  “Well, I guess there’s a limit to what we really need, huh?”

  “Yeah, I think so, too,” he said. “But this lady, I guess she needs everything I bring her.”

  “All of it?” I asked. “I imagine you can’t even walk through that house, then.”

  He smiled as he finished his cigarette and tossed it into the road. “Know her?” he asked.

  “Nope, can’t say that I do.” I checked the black metal mailbox by the driveway for a name, but there was none. As a matter of fact, there really wasn’t much of anything to the house. No decorations, no flower beds, no chairs on the front porch. A person wouldn’t even know that anyone lived there at all if it weren’t for the curtains in the windows. One of which, in the living room, moved a bit as I scanned the house.

  “Didn’t think so,” he said, checking his watch. The visit and the smoke break were over, I assumed. Time to get back to work. I was just about to offer a good-bye and a Merry Christmas when he continued: “Her name’s Eleanor,” he said. “Nice lady. Little reclusive, though. I guess some people are just like that.”

  “They are,” I answered, not bothering to add that I was one of them. “But she’s got all that stuff you bring her to keep herself occupied, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I figured.”

  “The two of you must be pretty familiar with each other by now. I’ve never seen a UPS driver stop and chat with someone they’re delivering a package to.”

  “Well,” he said, “when I started off, I’d just drop the box and ring the bell, you know, like I do everywhere. Then one day the door opens up before I could hit the button, and there she was. ‘Thank you, son,’ she says. Couple days later, same thing. After that, she just starts talking to me. I guess I expect it so much now that I build in a few extra minutes for it whenever this is one of my stops.”

  I looked at the house again, and again the living room curtains shifted a bit.

  “What’s she talk about?” I asked. “I mean, if you don’t mind me asking.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Normal stuff, I guess, weather and all that. Then I give her the package and she says stuff like ‘That so-and-so is so sweet’ or ‘I’ve missed talking to this person or that.’”

  “Who? Family or something?”

  “Nope. They’re the people she talks to on the phone when she orders her stuff.”

  “You’re kidding me,” I said. “You mean she orders so much stuff that she knows the operators by name?”

  “Oh yeah,” he said. “Most of ’em anyway.”

  “What a greedy old lady,” I said, shaking my head at the curtains that were moving again. “But I guess we all sometimes think we can buy our happiness, huh?”

  “Nah, man,” he said with a laugh, “you don’t get it. Take a look around. All these houses bunched together like a glorified apartment complex. Fences everywhere. All these people, but even on a day like this no one’s at home. Everybody’s working, doing their own thing, got their own lives and their own problems. A lady like Eleanor, she doesn’t have anybody. She don’t order stuff because she thinks those things will make her happy. She orders stuff to talk to the operators. To have a little company.”

  I opened my mouth and said nothing. I couldn’t. I had never heard of anyone doing such a thing. “So,” I said eventually, “she’s got all the stuff in there that she’ll never use just so she can talk to someone?”

  “Nope,” he said as he climbed back into his truck. “She returns it all. Like I said, she just wants the company.” He turned the key in the ignition and the truck came to life. “I figure I can take a few minutes out of my day to talk to a lady like that.”

  “Yeah, I figure,” I said.

  “Well, I gotta go. Nice talkin’ to ya. Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas,” I answered.

  He pulled off then and left me there alone. Well, almost alone. The living room curtains moved once more.

  I stood there and studied the mailbox again. No name, just a number. The driver said her name was Eleanor, though he hadn’t bothered with a last name and I hadn’t bothered to ask.

  Why didn’t I bother to ask? I wondered.

  I looked up and down the street. It was one of the main roads that ran through the neighborhood, a mile or so long from the church to my own street up at the end. Twenty, maybe thirty houses lined each side, most of which were families of at least three. I did the quick math with my head and a few fingers. There were about two hundred people around there, more or less. Probably more.

  I realized, too, that I passed by Eleanor’s house just about every day. Not only did I not know who lived there, I honestly couldn’t recall ever noticing the house at all. How was it possible to miss such a thing? But I supposed that I was always preoccupied with where I was going or just in a hurry to get back. There’s a lot you can miss by letting your mind wander out just ahead of everything else.

  The living room curtains moved again, and I was sure that Eleanor was trying to get an eyeful. She was undoubtedly wondering what the strange man in the driveway was up to. I could picture her, nervous and shaky, waiting for me to make my move so she could pick up the Pottery Barn catalog and call for help.

  What a horrible way to live. I made a mental note to mention her in my prayers when I went to bed. Maybe Abby could put her on the prayer list at church.

  People like Eleanor always made me count my blessings. Sometimes you didn’t realize what you had until you saw someone who had a lot less. I shook my head and thanked the Lord for giving me people to love and love me back.

  “Thank You, Jesus,” I said, walking toward home and believing that was the end of it.

  There are people who think God doesn’t really speak anymore, that prayer is just a message sent via divine mailman who delivers them to God, who then ponders over them and performs His will. I disagree with that notion. I think He speaks often. Not in that grandfatherly voice you hear in the movies, but in more of a whisper to your heart. It’s a notion you know didn’t come from you, a feeling that just wasn’t there before. That’s why I can say this and with a great degree of certainty: at three o’clock in the afternoon of my snow day, on Crescent View Drive in the town of Mattingly in the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States of America in the western hemisphere of Planet Earth, God spoke to me.

  “What are you than
king Me for?” the voice said. “For giving you a family? Friends? Well then, you’re welcome. Glad to do it. But what about that lady down the road you just blew off? Don’t you think she could use a little blessing, too? Oh but that’s right, you have your own problems. Job stuff. Wow, that’s too bad. I could have used you back there. You think I do all the blessing in the world Myself? Hey, ever think that sometimes I do My blessing through other people? But you just shake your head and say, ‘Poor lady.’ How Christian of you. Maybe if she’s really lucky, you’ll remember to say that prayer for her tonight right before you doze off. Maybe you’ll make a passing mention of her in church. That’d be great.

  “Let me remind you of something. You are a soldier. You are My soldier. One of many. And we’re all at war. Don’t you remember that? Your job is to fight the enemy, not to ignore it. Your job is to heal. It’s to piece together. The loneliness that Eleanor is feeling? One of your enemies. And what are you doing? ‘I’ll pray,’ you say. But you know what? You’re using that as an excuse to do nothing.

  “I made the world such that no one can survive it alone. Some try. Some even think it can be done. But it can’t. Love one another: I didn’t just say that one time a couple thousand years ago. I say that every day. Love is an action word. It means doing something. So do something.

  “I didn’t build the human heart whole. I left pieces out. I kept the biggest for Myself and then I gave the other pieces to your wife, to your children, to your family and your friends. The rest are scattered about among others, many of whom you don’t even know yet. Without those pieces you can still function, you can still live your life and even think you’re doing something constructive. But the fact remains that without all of those pieces, you are not what you should be. Not even close. Some people know all of this and spend their lives trying to make sure those pieces are found. Their hearts are whole. Other people don’t know. They don’t bother trying to find those pieces, and they wonder why they feel so empty inside.