Baby, It's Cold Outside

I’m one of those people who has a song for just about everything, including potty training, swimming in a swimming pool, and, thanks to Bubble Guppies, for taking the grand-dogs outside. So it’s no surprise to my family that the song on my lips this week has been Frank Loesser’s classic duet, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”

It sure has been cold outside. I’d heard of the Polar Express, but I’d never heard of a Polar Vortex until this week. According to the weather experts, a polar vortex is a persistent, large-scare cyclone or low pressure system located near either of a planet’s geographical poles. Since I thought cyclones only occurred in Kansas during the Wizard of Oz, this was news to me. Call it what you will, it certainly brought chillingly cold weather to us, resulting in burst pipes and even a water emergency when intake mechanisms in Lake Erie got frozen. The photographs from lighthouses along the lake shore and from Niagara Falls were spectacular – an incredible winter wonderland, if only the wind chill wasn’t so unbearable.

I was sure that my childhood days in Buffalo were just as cold on a daily basis as the weather on January 7, 2014, but some quick Internet research showed that while we had our cold days, especially for the walk home at lunchtime every day, the frosty temperatures on the thermometer were definitely outside the norm. Those childhood days were cold, but this event was “historic” in its extreme temperatures.

When something goes wrong or life circumstances puts me in a snit, I do draw upon the truth that someone, somewhere, has it much worse than I do. And that is true in regards to our frigid weather. As one example, the Canadian city of Winnipeg averages twelve days per year at twenty-two degrees below zero  or lower– and that’s in Fahrenheit. That’s definitely tougher to handle than one day at ten below.

So what do they do? They “plug in” their cars to keep the engine block from freezing, they don’t use their cell-phones or iPads outside, and they do not attempt to determine if their tongues will stick to metal, because as Flick found out in A Christmas Story, it will stick! Winnipeg residents even have a standard answer when asked how long winter lasts. Here’s what they say – “until the mosquitoes arrive.”

On the other side of the world, local residents have the opposite problem – it’s too hot. There’s been a heat wave in some parts of Australia in recent days, and it has caused the death of thousands of bats. Apparently bats cannot live in temperatures over 106 degrees, and so our Aussie friends have been watching bats fall from the sky in droves, ending up DOA. Don’t be surprised if there’s a bat-filled remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds coming soon to the theater near you. Remember, you heard it first in the Ashland Times-Gazette.

“How are you?” We ask each other this question just about every time we meet. Sometimes the response we get is, “I can’t complain.”Of course, it’s always possible to complain about the weather, the economy, or our mother-in-law, but after a while, nobody’s listening anymore. I like the way Maya Angelou puts it: “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain.” Now I’m not suggesting that we trivialize the tragic occurrences in our lives, but, like Alexander in Judith Viorst’s book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, sometimes we go to bed with gum in our mouth and wake up with gum in our hair. And, while Alexander threatened to move to Australia, sometimes the Australias in our lives aren’t any better than what we have – just ask the bats.

With the advent of warmer weather, the Polar Vortex of 2014 lives on only in our memory. We can be grateful for the warmth of our homes and the rapidly rising temperatures. And since it is predicted to be in the 40s today, I’m changing my tune, humming Irving Berlin’s 1933 hit, “Having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave.” After all, it’s simply a matter of perspective.