Asian Hot!

The big snowstorm started last night. Twenty-four hours later and there’s not a hint of it slowing down. There are rumors it might snow until Monday. Schools have shut down, stores are closing early, cars are pulling over to the side of the road and drivers are climbing out and walking. Men shovel driveways while dressed in snow boots and black face-concealing hoods that ensure I cross to the other side of the street. The air is blurry and cold and suspended in snow. It’s beautiful and impenetrable. But the best part of the snowstorm is being able to tell people: “I’ve got about ten inches.” One of those sentences I never thought I’d say in my life.

Fatherhood, I’ve discovered, is a constant source of unimagined sentences. I am still amazed at what I will say to my three-year-old daughter. Yesterday, while attempting to explain the mystery of unsatisfactory feces, I assured her, “It’s okay, honey. Sometimes poopoo is fluffy.” A couple weeks back, when we were at Barnes and Noble, I screamed across the store, with alarming enthusiasm, “Quick! Over here! I found unicorns!”

The tour itself remains equally unpredictable. The cities I expect to love (San Diego, Seattle, Denver) end up disappointing me, and the cities from which I expect nothing (i.e. the entire east coast) I find myself enjoying. I especially liked Jacksonville, despite my sister’s insistence that it is home to a disproportionate number of serial killers. She has no data to back up this claim. She also has the tendency to forget that she has already watched a movie until an hour into it, when she will suddenly announce, “Oh wait! I’ve seen this before!” But on her side is the unsettling fact that the beach in Jacksonville was covered with dead jellyfish resembling severed heads.

And in Buffalo, home of the all-American wing, I saw the following designation on the bottom of a menu at a Vietnamese restaurant:

*Hot
**Spicy Hot
***Asian Hot

White people, consider yourself warned.