11:36 a.m. - 2009-01-26
TS ELIOT WAS WRONG
April is not the cruelest month. January has that honor. I have gone to bed freezing and awakened frozen. I have gone to bed in flannel sleep pants, heavy socks and a hooded sweatshirt, huddled under countless layers of blankets like a hibernating mini-mammal.
I have driven to work peering anxiously through the lower portion of a gradually defrosting windshield. I have left for work in darkness and returned home in darkness. I have driven past countless cars and trucks stuck in the in the snow, in ditches and highway medians and even their own driveways. Four-wheel drivers, impatient with my conservative driving, have flashed their lights in my rearview mirror, roared past me like movie heroes, and been discovered minutes later, languishing in a ditch, their headlights pointing skyward like searchlights in an air raid.
I have driven to work in a sea of whiteness, feeling as if I were trapped in a beaker during a crystallization experiment.
January follows December, and the holidays are over. January follows Thanksgiving and Christmas, our two foremost Eating Holidays. January follows eggnog season. The Roman god Janus had one face looking forward and one looking backward. Janus stared gloomly in February, an even colder and snowier month; and Janus stared backward at his own enormous behind, the cruel reminder of two months of Eating Holidays.

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