LITMIR.BIZ

       A Geography of Snow

      MY FATHER has to go out in a storm. An eight-hour shift at the gasworks, then two or three hours tomorrow morning, All Saints’ Day morning, in a bar where Happy Hour starts at seven-thirty in the morning and ends at noon, and home through the snow he’ll walk, stinking of beer and CH₄, the chemical composition of natural gas. If you want to know how it smells in our house, scratch and sniff the card the utility company gives you so you can detect a leak in your gas-burning appliances. What the company adds is an “odorant.” My father and our house smell like an odorant.

      Pani—or “Madam”—Pilsudski, our neighbor, likes the smell when she comes over. “Oo-la-la,” she says when she gets a whiff. As my father grumbles and I page through my scrapbook of interesting newspaper articles, Mother starts talking to her in Polish in the living room. Having important things to do on my hobby, I try not to listen.

      My scrapbook has a three-ring metal binding and gray canvas covers. In light blue ink, I’m writing on the front cover, “STRANGE, FUNNY NEWS GATHERED BY ANDREW BORUCZKI.” The cover is hard to write on, and I have to go over the letters, almost carving them in. The front cover looks sloppy, which, when he sees it, serves as an irritant, not an odorant, to my father, who is trying to raise me right and who, sitting here in a sleeveless undershirt with a tuft of hair curling up from his chest, says to me, “What’re you doing?”

      “Studying my newspaper clippings.”

      “Why you won’t think of me for one minute? I gotta go out in this weather to the plant. Put the scrapbook away and ask, ‘What can I do for my father?’”

      When I do ask, he answers, “I don’t know. Just don’t bury your head in a scrapbook all a-time.”

      In five hours, he has to leave for work on a night the radio said would be clear and mild. The weather depresses him. His job, combined with his naturally gloomy personality, inspire him to get drunk at the Warsaw Tavern, especially now around All Saints’ Day.When the weather and your job stink, when your life is passing you by and you will soon be a dead soul yourself, why not go on a rumba? To relieve the pressures of my life, I can’t go to taverns like he does; but tonight, if he doesn’t stop complaining, I’ll do something drastic and tomorrow’s newspaper will read, “Adolescent punches gas-stinking father during blizzard,” which will replace the lead clipping in my collection. In my scrapbook, the current No. 1 Best Story, Pick of the Week from the Superior Evening Telegram of October 25–31, 1968, tells of a woman who ties her boy’s hands together, dresses him in a pig suit, then puts him on public display. It is from California, an Associated Press story. As further punishment, the mother hangs a sign on her boy in the pig suit. The sign reads:

      I’m dumb pig [sic]. Ugly is what you will become if you lie and steal. Look at me squeel [sic]. My hands are tied because I cannot be trusted. This is a lesson to be learned. Look. Laugh. Thief. Stealing. Bad bo [sic].

      “MOM DENIES ABUSING SON DRESSED AS PIG,” says the headline. (I had to look up what “sic” means.)

      Another clipping reports on something closer to home.You will find it on page 2 of my binder under the title “Child Abuse”:

      Gerard Lenahan, Gordon,Wisc., used a marker to write “liar” in large letters on his ten-year-old son’s forehead, “I lied to friends and teacher” on his chest, and “I tell stories” on his back. Then he took his shirtless son to P&R Pub in Hawthorne and made him talk to customers and display the writings.

      Now my pop mutters, “They promised a sunny day and look-it what we got!”

      He uses the Polish word for snow, śnieg. Four or five inches of it cover the birdbath.

      “Maybe this’ll be my last Halloween

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