In weather like this, you pretty much have to blog about the snow and cold. But how to do it? Tell harrowing stories of my near-death experiences shoveling my driveway, or fighting traffic on Teflon streets? Fortunately I avoided both those activities today. Employ quirky and creative similes and metaphors, like James Lileks? I could try a weak emulation, but it’s late and I want to get to my Christmas cards. Casual wit takes a lot of hard work.

So I’ll talk about my Grandpa, Clarence Walker. I thought of him as I unloaded my groceries in the cold wind tonight. I remembered that Grandma Walker once told me that he had saved his brother’s (or brother-in-law’s) life, when they both got caught in a snowstorm in the woods. It was one of those classic situations where one guy wants to sit down and rest, and the other guy says, “No, you’ve gotta keep walking. If you fall asleep, you’ll die.” (I understand that’s not entirely true. You can sleep just fine in the snow if you’re well bundled up, especially if you let the snow drift on top of you like a blanket, as long as you’re not physically exhausted. It’s the exhaustion that kills you. I have to assume they were both exhausted that night).

This is Grandpa and Grandma Walker, with (reading left to right) my brother Moloch and me. Must have been around 1953. It was taken in the house in town to which they retired after Dad got married.

You’ll note that Grandpa was quite bald. He went bald when he was 17, when he caught the Spanish Flu. On the upside, the illness kept him out of the Great War. And genetically, he was probably destined to be bald anyway, judging by the rest of the family (my handsome head of hair seems to come from Mom’s side).

Grandpa hardly ever caught a break in his life, as I understand his story. In 1915 his family moved from Garden City, Iowa to Kenyon, Minnesota, and the train derailed in Kensett, Iowa (by odd coincidence, Moloch grew up to marry a girl from Kensett). Grandpa and his brothers were riding in a boxcar with the horses, and he was thrown up against something and injured his neck. He was never without chronic pain the rest of his life. He developed morbid high blood pressure, and back then they didn’t know any way to treat it but diet.

Eventually he got to the point where the doctor told him he couldn’t be a farmer anymore, or he’d die from the strain. So my dad took over the farm, and Grandpa took what jobs he could find in town. He was saved by World War II. He got a job reading instruments at a munitions plant near Minneapolis.

I only have dim memories of Grandpa Walker. I remember him being our church janitor for a while, and I was extremely proud that he was the guy who rang the bell after the service. He died in 1954, when he was 53 and I was three. A few years ago I attended a friend’s wedding in South Dakota, in an old Norwegian country church, and in the church basement afterwards I noticed an elderly man with a round, pinkish face, and a reflex I didn’t know I had got triggered, and I thought, “Grandpa Walker!” What I think I remembered was the pink complexion (consistent with high blood pressure), a detail I’d consciously forgotten.

And that’s tonight’s winter’s tale.