All year long, the Snow Samaritan quietly endures the boasts of the elderly couple down the street. Their children are grown and gone to impressive careers–on most days a point of great parental pride. But on days such as Sunday, when the sky disgorges snow that is too deep, too heavy, for the no longer spry parents to easily push aside, those pride-provoking children are simply . . . gone. Gone to Manhattan, to San Francisco, to Tokyo, to far-off places where they lead their own fruitful lives. Places where, frankly, they aren’t of any immediate help.
Maybe the job of moving all that snow goes to the entrepreneurial 12-year-old who lives down the block–and who’s saving money for yet another “Lord of the Rings” DVD.
Often, though, one in an army of unheralded heroes rides a snowblower, or a shovel, to the rescue. These are the Snow Samaritans, generous souls of varying ages, sizes and genders who, every winter, materialize without fanfare in neighborhoods across the northern United States.
On Sunday, partly because most of them didn’t have to work at their regular jobs or attend school, the Samaritans were out in force. On many blocks the paths worn by their snowblowers and shovels sprawled well beyond the bounds of their own sidewalks and driveways–toward the houses of the elderly shut-in, the single parent with small kids, even the boastful couple whose children-in-absentia will, with the spring thaw, again be objects only of yammering pride.
What moves the Samaritan is an unstated appreciation of the fact that snowstorms are great equalizers. They descend with fury–but without discrimination–on the young and the old, the healthy and the impaired, the prepared and the frazzled. Knowing that the ability to cope is as unevenly distributed as household income–two variables that often aren’t correlated–the Samaritan embraces an elemental truth:
At house after house, somebody has to move the snow. And the somebody who lives behind the door may be unable to make that happen.
Why–the assertive, three-letter question that on other days pre-empts so many acts of kindness before they even begin–for once doesn’t matter. All that matters to the Samaritan is that someone unequivocally, and rather immediately, needs help. Help that, yes, requires unreimbursed effort. But help that is its own reward to recipient and giver alike.
The Samaritan club is not exclusive: Anyone can join. Just as, seven pages deeper into the calendar, anyone can take a moment on blistering August days to make sure that vulnerable neighbors are weathering the heat.
Here is a weather forecast the Tribune guarantees to be infallible:
This winter will be cold with occasional snow.
That reality offers opportunity to Samaritans and Samaritans-to-be. Each of us, as we’re shoveling our own snow, is free to curse the aching back and brittle air. Provided we remember that, down the block, someone else’s unmanageable need can be our own comfort and warmth.
