Winter in Chicago

When I was a kid, in the winter when we would wake up to find a thick layer of snow on the ground, my spirits would soar. I would hurry on down to the kitchen and sit at the breakfast table so that I could listen to the old Philco radio. That radio, along with WGN, was the great arbiter of just how my day would go. 

            "and in Tinley Park the following schools are closed. All schools in District 146 are closed, Trinity Lutheran School closed, Saint George Catholic School closed....   " 

Snow day! At that point all hell would break loose. My brothers, sisters, and I would quickly finish our cereal and rush back upstairs to get dressed. We were going out to play! We weren't warned the night before that such a huge snow storm was coming, only that it would probably snow. There was no thirty minute weather report on the late night news. In fact back then the late night news lasted only fifteen minutes and I don't think there was even a weather man. We weren't sent into a polar vortex tizzy, days before the actual event. It was winter, it was cold, and it would snow. I don't understand what the big deal is these days with the obsessing over what the weather is going to be. In the summer it will be hot, warm, rainy, and tornadoey. It may suck or it will be great. In the winter it will always suck. It will snow and it will be cold in Chicago. Get over it, it isn't news. Now if a polar vortex came sweeping down from Canada in July, that would be fucking news, and the media would name it and call it something like Polar Vornado Alicia. And if they wanted to devote twenty four hour coverage to Polar Vornado Alicia on the cable news networks, I would be fine with that. But winter storms do not have names. They are not all encompassing news that needs to be reported on by nitwits that freeze shirts and throw boiling water into the air to prove that it is cold. The people who live up north know that it's cold. It isn't news to them. And those of us who live where it is forever warm, where giant bugs still roam the yard in January, where you still have to clean the swimming pool every week because it hasn't frozen over, we don't care. Other than that, it does give us a heads up that our northern friends and family will be showing up shortly.