Just now, walking back from the coffee shop, I was surprised by a twang of guilt toward something that entertained me fifteen years ago. It was the winter of the ice storm, the winter when it snowed twelve inches deep then rained a sheet of ice on top while the temperature fell below ten degrees and stayed that cold for a week. Our world became an ice age with people stranded everywhere. I kept myself holed up at the apartment of my girlfriend of the time. We drank whiskey and smoked pot and quickly ran out of food. When we made our adventurous walk to the grocery store, we filled our backpacks with unnecessary supplies, excitedly imagining that this was the end of the world. I remember we walked on the smooth ice above the buried grass falling repeatedly on our asses and laughing at each other. I remember clawing at the ice and sliding toward a hill, unable to stop myself before that hill swallowed me down, and my girlfriend laughing and pointing, falling on her own ass and following my slide. Finally we came to that small grocery store, ready to load up with whatever supplies we could further bulge into our backpacks. We crossed the rear lot as two older men came carefully toward the dumpster, arms loaded with flattened cardboard boxes. We were high and wanted no part of conversation, and tried to walk past unnoticed. But Arbutus was a ghost town in that ice storm, and one of the men was a smart ass. He said, “Going camping?” And as he and his friend started laughing like that was the best joke of the year, the man took a bad step on the ice. His feet slid out with such sudden velocity that I swear his body was horizontal before it even began its descent. There was cardboard everywhere and the smack of his body on the hard ice, and it’s too much of an effort not to laugh when someone busts his ass. As this man laid stunned on the ice, his friend at his side, my old girlfriend and I had to walk away fast to hide the hilarity that was bubbling to burst out. And just now walking back from the coffee shop this memory hit me with a surprising twang of guilt. I hope that man was okay.
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That’s a real interesting story, NAV, one I hadn’t heard before. By the way, I wonder what I was doing during that ice storm, since I was still in Maryland then. Wait a sec; come to think of it, I remember now, wait, lots of ice, right? Slipping and sliding all over the place, yeah, that’s it. I was carrying some cardboard boxes, behind a dumpster, I remember now, and I saw this guy and his girlfriend, actually I smelled them first, from all the pot…it’s all a blur after that. I seem to have lost my memory (must have hit my head on the ice or something). Anyway, don’t feel guitly. I was being a smart-ass and I deserved it. Sorry ’bout that.