The Grace of Silence Read Free Page A

life.

2
Block Busters
    BEFORE THE ALARM CLOCK GOES OFF , before the smell of coffee or bacon finds its way to your bedroom door, there’s often a sound outside your window that jolts you out of slumber during winter months in Minnesota. It’s the scrape of a snow shovel against wet cement. I know the sound so well. The thwack of the blade cutting through snow, the drag of metal across pavement, the thump of the payload landing somewhere on the lawn.
    Thwack, swoosh, thud! Three steps in four-quarter rhythm, over and over, until the job is done. The thought sends an all-too-familiar ache through my shoulders. All the same, in my house as a child, I myself rarely awoke to the sounds of snow being shoveled. I listened to it going on outside my kitchen window while wolfing down Malt-O-Meal or scrambled eggs. You see, by the time the rest of the neighborhood began their collective assault on the snow, our walkway was already whistle clean. That was a point of pride for my father. When the Westvigs and the Murrays and the Bowmans and the Pratts ventured out of their stucco homes, they would look over and see that the sidewalk around Belvin and Betty Norris’s lot was already free of snow and ice. Dad would be in the house, sipping coffee, a self-satisfied grin on his face, tiny icicles still dangling from his mustache. My parents were always house proud.
    We lived on a corner lot on the South Side of Minneapolis,which was at once a blessing and a curse. In the summer, it meant we had a larger yard to play in and nearly an extra hour of daylight. Oakland Avenue was lined with towering elms that formed a thick, protective canopy. But our intersection broke up the tree line and toward the end of day we could look to the sky from our two-story Tudor house with its curved ten-foot bay window. At sundown the glow would radiate through that window like lemonade spilling out of a pitcher. We called it the golden hour.
    In winter the corner lot meant extra work. We didn’t just have to clear the T-shaped stretch of sidewalk that led from our stone steps to the street. We also had the fan-shaped curve at the corner to contend with, the long stretch of cement along the side of the house, the driveway leading up to the garage, and the opening to the alley. All that, and no sons in the house. So as soon as I could walk I was given an itty-bitty shovel. First a plastic one to get the feel of the thing, but within a year or two, a junior version of an adult shovel, wood and metal. A shovel was a tool for survival in Minnesota, so you had better get the hang of it early on. Though it’s not written down anywhere, there is strict shoveling etiquette in Minneapolis. No matter how much snow falls the night before, you are obliged to clear your walkway and driveway before leaving the house in the morning. No exceptions. My father went one step further and decreed that snow had to be cleared before our neighbors arose. No matter what, you had to adjust. Six inches of snow: wake up forty-five minutes early. Twelve inches of snow: better make that two hours. If it was a whopper of a storm, you’d do some shoveling before bedtime to skim the first few inches, then rise early to shovel the rest, satisfied that your work the night before had reduced the morning’s accumulation.
    For a man raised in the Birmingham heat, my father took to this with alacrity. He’d suit up in big black galoshes and a tightlittle watch cap and head outside like Teddy Roosevelt preparing to charge San Juan Hill. Everybody shoveled. Mom. Me. My two half sisters, Cindy and Marguerite. No use complaining or you’d pull double duty. This, too, was a point of pride. We were a family of hardworking folk, and my parents looked for every opportunity to trumpet the note. Belvin and Betty Norris were block busters when they purchased their stucco home near the Minnehaha Parkway in South Minneapolis. “We weren’t trying to be activists,” my mother said. “We just decided it