The Columns

I love my snow shovel.

Ok, I'll admit that doesn't exactly rank up there with Tristan and Isolde (look it up) or Rachel and Ross (see "Tristan and Isolde" or "Monica and Chandler"). But some of us are just prone to simple passions. And here in Michigan, from about the third week of December through the third week of March, a snow shovel is a guy's best friend, the infantryman's rifle, Zorro's sword, Linus' blanket.

Every Midwestern man knows that his snow shovel is his winter lifeline. Without it, he could get completely snowed-in, trapped, unable to provide his family with any of the basic necessities of winter survival, like Doritos and beer.

My wife and I met on a blind date 34 years ago today. We had lunch. We strolled around Ann Arbor, swapping philosophical insights. Later in the evening I played my guitar and sang John Denver songs to her, while she convincingly pretended to enjoy them.

By the end of that date we were spouting love sonnets and declaring our mutual devotion to the heavens. We were Romeo and Juliet, only without all the poisoning and stabbing.

Our second date just happened to be on Valentine's day. It was a very good Valentine's day.

Well, it's over. The Pittsburgh Steelers are dumping champagne over each others' Super Bowl XLIII Champion caps and thanking their Lord and Savior for standing by them and guiding every savage hit on an opponent from the very beginning of this long, tough NFL season. Meanwhile, the Arizona Cardinals are quietly waxing philosophical and consoling each other with a cold beer - probably not Steel City.

So what have we really accomplished here today?

For one thing, as a game-watching nation we wolfed down something like 1.2 billion chicken wings and 15 thousand tons of chips, along with enough ranch dressing, salsa, onion dip and guacamole to turn the grand canyon into a scenic condiment bowl. Some statistician with a lot of time on his hands has actually calculated that the amount of Orville Redenbacher we chowed would make a popcorn string long enough to stretch more than 5.5 laps around the world.

And we washed it all down with 52 million cases of beer.

January in Michigan means the sharp smell of wood smoke in the crisp winter air, the windblown drifts of purest snow outlining the soft contour of the compost heap, the thrill of skidding on one heel across an icy parking lot with an armload of groceries, and the chore of chipping snotcicles from the tip of your frostbitten nose.

But as wonderful as this season may be in so many ways, some of us are not all that crazy about the fact that we get to see the sun for maybe an hour a month. Not only are the days ridiculously short, we also have a brooding shroud of clouds parked overhead pretty much from November through March.

The Gray Days are so profound around here that they can cause their very own form of clinical depression, a psychological disorder with maybe the most appropriate acronym ever – SAD. This stands for Seasonal Affective Disorder, which pretty much boils down to sufferers being clinically pissed off about all the crappy weather.

Since late last week anyone more alert than, say, a block of wood, has been obsessing over the dramatic story of US Airways Flight 1549. For any blocks of wood among my readers, this was the commercial airline flight that sucked some extremely (and briefly) surprised Canada geese into both engines and lost power 3,000 feet over New York City.

The pilot of the airplane, Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger III (for reasons that should be fairly obvious, everyone calls him "Sully"), made a series of split-second decisions, flew dead-stick across Midtown, barely cleared the George Washington Bridge, and executed a masterful crash landing in the middle of the Hudson River. All 150 passengers and crew aboard walked away from Flight 1549 without serious injury.