I USED TO LAUGH at Baltimore's attitude toward snow. Now I have adopted it.
This is a community that, on the whole, fears the flakes. Years ago when I moved here from the Midwest, I couldn't get over the fact that events were canceled and workers sent home before any significant moisture fell from the skies.
In one instance that has now become part of family lore, I drove our then-small sons to school on a snowy morning only to be summoned an hour later and told to fetch them. Virtually no one had shown up, so school had been called off. My kids were mortified that their father did not have sense enough to know that when it snowed you were supposed to hunker down, not venture out.
Now, however, I have flip-flopped on the flakes.
Yesterday I was the one who was canceling a road trip today up Interstate 95 with my sons to eat cheesesteaks and watch a college basketball game. My beloved Kansas Jayhawks are playing the Villanova Wildcats today at Philadelphia's Wachovia Center. It is probably my only chance to see my alma mater play this basketball season. I bought tickets to the game some time ago. But I doubt that I am going to travel. I am scared of the snow.
Forecasters are calling for significant snow today, accumulations of anywhere from 4 inches to a foot.
It could be a false alarm. The storm could miss us or turn out not to be very nasty. That is what my kids, now 19 and 24, contend. They view the trip in the snow as an adventure. I see it as potential catastrophe. They have visions of wolfing down fragrant sandwiches at Jim's Steaks on South Street. I see us stranded in a ditch off I-95, praying to Our Lady of the Highways for deliverance.
Part of the difference in outlook is age. They are young and daring. I am not. But experience is also a factor. I have seen how some folks in this clime behave when snow falls -- driving either at 2 or 200 mph, driving without their lights on, neglecting to remove the Mount Rushmore of snow from the roofs of their cars -- and it is not a confidence builder.
So yesterday, rather than preparing for an outing, I prepared for the worst. I got ready for a snowstorm Baltimore-style.
I made a provisioning run to stock the household with enough foodstuffs and beverages to withstand a two-week siege. Much has been written about the trinity of groceries -- bread, milk and toilet paper -- that Baltimore-area households feel they must have to survive a snowstorm. I bought some yesterday because I believe in the totemic value of this trinity. I have a hunch that the more you enlarge your supply of milk, bread and toilet paper, the more you weaken the force of any approaching storm.
