Here, gone and back again: A snow story
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- January 29, 2022
- 874
The irony was impossible to ignore.
The morning after a rare Carolina snowfall, my wife and I spent several hours taking down and packing up Christmas decorations.
Through every window, the world looked like something out of Currier and Ives, a winter landscape of inestimable beauty, the woods and lawn covered in a nostalgic blanket of new-fallen snow.
Like so much of what passes for reality in the American South, appearances can be cruelly deceptive, as was the case that day, but despite roads and bridges being closed due to an underlying lack of adequate preparation, I ignored the obvious and tried to enjoy it all.
There was hardly any significant accumulation, just enough to suggest an anomaly, a break from the routine, and that sparked more memories than I ought to enumerate, given my propensity for exploring tangential rabbit holes, often at expository expense.
So I’ll limit myself to just one.
In winter 1977 I found myself at a crossroads. One way led back to college for post-graduate studies; the other pointed in the direction of a potential career as a professional journalist.
Both were possible options because I had been offered a fellowship at Notre Dame even as I considered the full-time job offer I had received from my hometown newspaper. It was important that I consider my decision rationally and keep a keen eye on my future.
But there was a mitigating circumstance: a woman’s faithless love.
Isn’t that always the way?
And that’s where Meat Loaf comes into the narrative.
That winter, before I’d taken the Graduate Record Exam but after the girl I thought I might spend the rest of my life with kicked me to the curb, I heard a song called “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad.”
In it, the singer tells the story of betrayal and heartbreak, and given my state of mind at the time, it’s no wonder the lyrics spoke to me:
“But you’ve been cold to me so long
I’m crying icicles instead of tears.”
This was back in the days of record stores and FM radio and word-of-mouth accounts that could take an album by an unknown artist and ignite a firestorm of demand in listeners who were tuned in.
WMMS, Cleveland’s Home of the Buzzard as it was known, put “Bat Out of Hell,” an LP of only seven songs, in heavy rotation, including the title track, a 10-minute opus of almost operatic fury.
Meat Loaf had one of those voices — commanding and powerful yet capable of nuance and inflection — that you didn’t hear every day, and I made it my purpose in life to get that album immediately.
Problem was, in my little town, no one had it for sale, but being the enterprising young man that I was, a 22-year-old with a broken heart and no full-time job, it was easy to plot my next move.
“Hey,” I said to my friend as he picked up. “What’re you doing?”
“When?”
“Right now,” I said. “This afternoon.”
“Well,” he said, “as it happens, I’m sitting here watching TV with the sound down watching ‘Gilligan’s Island.’ Mary Ann’s so hot.”
“Feel like a road trip?” I asked, lacing up my sneakers and grabbing my jean jacket, knowing what his answer would be.
My 1969 Chevy Impala, with a sturdy 327 V-8, was used to winter weather, having been driven back and forth between Northeast Ohio and South Bend many times, so a few flurries were nothing.
As I continued up I-71, however, the snow began to stick, and as we approached Cleveland, rush hour traffic intensified and I heard a little voice in my head saying, “Um, maybe this was a mistake.”
But when you’re on a mission for Meat Loaf, you don’t turn back.
Peaches in Parma Heights was among the finest record stores I knew about, and as I’d hoped, “Bat Out of Hell” was not only in stock, but also was playing on the stereo system. After I’d secured my copy, I drove us home in what was rapidly becoming a blizzard.
These days you’d never go to such extremes for an album; heck, there are barely any record stores left, and those that have survived have decided overpricing vinyl re-releases is the new normal.
Meat Loaf died the other day at the age of 74. His passing has made this January yet another in an endless series of bleak ones, a trend I’ve come to expect but still find difficult to endure.
That’s the biggest reason I insist on keeping the house decorated for Christmas long after its expiration date has passed.
As my wife and I worked shoulder to shoulder, efficiently removing wreaths from the walls and Santas from the shelves, I took a moment to appreciate our snow-draped landscape, thinking it might be a fine idea to lace up my sneakers, throw on my jean jacket and take a quiet walk outside, just to remember it all.