The Good Samaritan Highway

“Where’s my GODDAMN tea?” Charlene playfully yelled to me from the bathroom.

One of my jobs around the house is making the morning tea. The task only fell under my jurisdiction because I wake up before her every single morning. On most days I serve it to her while she is still sleeping. And, and it generally gets cold before she wakes up to drink it. Oddly, she doesn’t seem to mind that it gets cold. She just reheats it in the microwave. What she does mind, however, is if she wakes up and the tea isn’t on her nightstand. Then I get an earful.

The tea had just been coming to a boil when she beckoned for it. “Hold your GODDAMN horses,” I laughingly yelled back. “It’s almost ready!”

Charlene and I sat in front of the television, sipped our tea, and watched the weather for a few minutes before she announced, “I feel like I want to knit all day. What are you going to do?”

What she really meant to ask me is, “When are you going to get your ass outside and dig the cars out of the snow?”

“I was thinking of going outside and digging the cars out of the snow,” I replied.

I got bundled back up in my winter getup and headed outside shovel in hand. I assessed the distance between myself and the cars, took a deep breath, and plodded intently through the snow.

It took me about an hour to excavate our cars from under the snow. The only thing that stood between the cars and the freedom of plowed road, at that point, was about 1000 square feet of waist high snow – and an abandoned Ford Explorer.

The idea of trudging knee-to-chest back to the apartment was not particularly inviting, but it did invigorate me to begin construction an elaborate walking path that spanned from the plowed road all the way to the front door. In true Jersey fashion, I even built an exit that led directly to our cars.

About halfway through the project, some of my neighbors, debilitated by the snow, shouted desperately down from their windows and asked if I could dig them out. They also wanted to know who’s effin’ truck was blocking the parking lot.

Although not in my original blueprint, I was more than happy to disentomb my forsaken neighbors from the massive snowdrifts they were trapped under. They were so grateful for my assistance that my walkway quickly became known in the community as the ‘Good Samaritan Highway’.