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1/15/1999 Crystal Palace5:00 p.m. The alarm woke me up at 5:20 a.m. I fumbled around with it, finally resetting it to 6:20 for Tab, but until not after I had accidentally reset the current time ahead by an hour and then corrected it. Zounds, I hate that clock-radio! It's irritated me since I first moved in with Tab (can it be?) eleven years ago. It has six hard little nubbins for controls, all crowded together. Back when I had to get up every morning before Tab, I was always hitting what I thought was the snooze button, but what would invariably turn out to be the control that turned the alarm completely off. I claimed the clock was poorly designed, but Tab always countered that my own clumsiness, not the design, was to blame. I often suggested that we buy a new clock-radio, one with large, friendly controls and a huge snooze button on top. Tab refused, even though this clock-radio had been a freebie, a premium he'd received when he subscribed to Time some years before. No, this one was special because it also had a phone! The phone died several years ago, but we still have the clock-radio. It must be close to 15 years old. Most marriages don't last as long as Tab's relationship with this infernal appliance. Having finally wrested the alarm clock into submission, I went downstairs. What sounded like a heavy rain was pelting the windows; unfortunately, it wasn't just rain but heavy sleet or freezing rain (what is the difference between those two, anyway?). It must have been sleeting for hours because when I looked out of the door, the ice on the sidewalks and street was at least two inches thick and reflected the porch light like glass. I dressed, pulled my "Spiky" protectors (worth their weight in gold today) over my shoes, and went out to investigate. The car was entombed in ice, and the street looked even worse up close. I removed the Spiky from one of my shoes and slid my foot experimentally along the sidewalk. There was absolutely no traction. I went in, and reluctantly called Sarah to cancel. It's something I really hate to do--back out of something I had agreed to do--but something, nevertheless, I seem to be doing a lot recently. She took it very well. I gave her some suggestions: she could call a cab, or drive Rita's car and park it at the Hyatt for us to pick up later, or she could try to switch to a later flight, the best option, I thought. She called later to say she had managed to get a later flight, after many long minutes on hold, and would need a ride to the Hyatt this afternoon. As it turns out, according to the radio, no planes were flying in or out of Newark this morning, anyway. Tab got up around 6:00. All my clumsy setting and re-setting of the alarm clock woke him up enough so that he had found it impossible to go back to sleep. After showering and dressing, he went out to start the car and left it running to warm up and begin melting the chrysalis of ice. Our neighbor Vicky was supposed to take him to the train station on her way to work, but since she decided not to go into work because of the ice, we asked her to sit in our living room in case one of the kids woke up while I took Tab to the train station. I clutched the passenger seat arm rest convulsively throughout most of that trip. Actually, the main roads were not too bad, but our back streets were very slippery. I was most nervous on the freeway. Tab is a careful driver, but there are heaps of people who don't know how to drive on the winter roads, and I'm always fearful that one day we'll cross fenders with one of them. When I could relax enough to look around at the passing scene, I marveled at its treacherous beauty. The dark, wet streets glowed with green, amber, and red patches, reflections of traffic lights. The trees were coated with ice, each individual twig sharply defined like a work of art encased in crystal. I thought that if the clouds lifted and the sun appeared, the trees would be glorious, glittering branches heavy with ice diamonds. But the sun did not appear all day until late afternoon, long after the ice had melted off the trees.
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