alert the emergency room, i'm using the snowblower
/Against my better judgment, one day I learned how to use the snowblower we finally bought after years of either shoveling by hand or paying some embarrassing fee for a guy with a big shovel attached to a macho truck to come to our rescue and make Ray look like a puny weightlifting failure.
“My savior,” I would croon as the BTOD, Big Truck on Driveway, lifted the barrier between us and the outside world as easily as Superman lifted his damsel, Lois Lane.
Not anymore.
“You’re not gonna believe how easy this is,” said Ray, as he rolled the new orange robot out of the garage after a big snowfall. And then with the patience usually reserved for people paying him money, he proceeded to give me enough directions to make me look longingly at our silent shovels hanging frozen in time, relics once worthy of custom-created hooks on the dingy garage wall.
The lesson formally began with him saying the snowblower weighed two hundred pounds, almost twice my size, and ended with a deep pause, a penetrating stare, and an emphatic warning that, should I ever find the whirling dervish getting further and further away from the house with me being dragged along like a mound of slush, I should “JUST LET GO AND IT WILL STOP.”
In between the rollout and the fear of doom, he said something about a choke which sounded like the most counter-intuitive mechanical process ever created. He said, “Put the lever in the open position for off and the closed position for on.” Because I looked like he was speaking an Inuit tongue, he leapt over the machine and grabbed my throat for show.
“See, I’m choking you and the choke is on, but your throat is cut off.”
Since I lacked enough blood to nod, he kept modeling the action until his handprints became stained on my neck like sunburn on an ice cube. Then we both started gasping because he’d forgotten to turn the real choke on, or maybe off, and we were inhaling giant balls of smoky fumes.
“JUST LET GO AND MAKE IT STOP,” I sputtered, and he swaggered back to the machine like a cowboy to his horse and finally choked—or unchoked—it instead of me.
It was the look on Ray’s face when I took our new family member out for an inaugural stroll, giving it an encouraging pat on its square bottom, that made me start swaggering myself in defiance because his head was cocked sideways, and he was staring bemused like I was a kid learning to ride a bike. He was curious to see if I could keep the thing moving safely straight ahead, or if I’d lose a toe to the churning shark teeth spitting out pure white and hopefully nothing red or flesh- toned.
He has seen me burned, stabbed, sprained, and broken by everyday events so often that he waited with a mixture of entertainment and fear, wondering if this would be my finest hour or my latest trip to the emergency room.
He also knows I need to understand how everything works down to the smallest minutiae, and when a giant Aha! goes off that rivals the big bang, I begin babbling about why I didn’t become a world-class scientist and perhaps there is still time to rethink my career.
Except by the next day when he suggested I practice my skills, the idea seemed as foreign to me as if we were on the ocean and the driveway was underwater. I couldn’t even remember how to get the machine out of the garage. Do I have to turn it on first? What if it rams into my car? What if I forget to open the garage door and my snowblower and I die from our respective chokes?
I even mashed and bloodied a finger pressing my password into the garage keypad. Pressing is not as harmless as it seems if you approach the task hoping your finger will prevent you from proceeding any further.
So what do I do when the big snow comes? Do I nostalgically reach for the shovel, backbreaking or not, or should I be brave and conquer the orange churner though the thought makes my hands and feet curl tightly to my body?
Or should I climb to the top of the roof—wearing a wind-blown dress, high heels, and red lipstick of course—and pray that Superman, with his X-ray vision and Big Truck, is just about ready to round the corner?