I’ve been enjoying this site for a few years without posting, but you guys have really inspired me today. There’s been some disputation about Buffalo weather in this thread. Well, here’s my take: A “Four Seasons Tribute” to my beloved hometown.
Winter: Getting up with my brother at 5:30 to deliver our newspapers -- pitch darkness and hellish weather be damned -- and never missing a day in 3 years (even that first morning in ’77, when our main goal was to prevent our eyeballs from getting lashed from our faces). Simple and unsaid rule: our dad went out to work in the worst winter weather, and so the hell did we.
Spring: That ONE day, when you would stumble out of school into the brightness, throw off your jacket, roll up your sleeves for the first time since September, and then just stand there – silent, slack-jawed, blinking with disbelief; feeling that indescribably sweet warmth on your skin. No one could ever experience that feeling without first living through a Buffalo winter.
Summer: Dull roar of kids playing outside mixed with the dawn-to-dusk blare of lawnmowers and 97 Rock. 10-cent afternoon swims at the public pool, Lions-PAL baseball at Delaware Park, Chevy Tonawanda UAW softball games, evening basketball and touch football after the church parking-lot asphalt cooled down a bit. Jostling with my brothers to grab the sports page when the BEN arrived, eager to check out the Bills’ training-camp news (some rookie named Lucious Sanford hitting everything that moves …).
Fall: In the backyard on an exquisitely beautiful late-September Sunday afternoon. Tossing around a football with my brothers while Van Miller calls out the play-by-play from our parents’ 1950s-vintage radio, perched in the open dining-room window. Rookie Jerry Butler scores FOUR touchdowns, Bills beat the hated Jets – and the very first leaves are starting to tinge red and gold on the maple trees.
I adore my non-Buffalonian wife, but if I told her that September afternoon with my brothers was probably one of the 5 happiest days of my life, she would look at me with disbelief -- and I honestly couldn’t blame her. The damn thing is, I don’t know any of you guys here on TBD, but you all understand exactly what I mean. THAT is why I love Buffalo …
