New Years Day, 1984, a Sunday, around noon, I met Ralph for the first time. He had just crashed his car into my garage door. He promised to fix it later, which he did, expertly, and thus our sudden, idiotic introduction was concluded.
We’d had a genuine blizzard New Years Eve, you can look it up. Anyway, I was up at dawn and shoveled my driveway clean. My driveway. I'd only been living here for a month. The snowplow had yet to clear the road, which is to say, the snowplow had yet to pile an evil mountain of compacted ice at the street end of, my driveway.
As it so happened, after I shoveled my driveway clean, ice formed on the concrete. A beauteous snowbound dawn, an inspirational usurpation of windswept drifts, white writ large and overwhelming with no apology, and I'd finished up, gotten comfy, coffee in hand and college football on the television.
All unbeknownst to me, Ralph pulled in to my driveway and went over to shovel out his own, next door. During which time the aforementioned snowplow went by, blocking his car in my driveway.
When he first tried to back out of my driveway, he couldn't barrel through the plows insidious new drift of blatant obstruction. So, as he explained to me on that forever morning ago, he pulled up so as to get a running start. After crashing into my garage door, he ultimately barreled out and went off to dig out a snowbound kindred. It took me an hour to clear the end of my driveway. Then it snowed, again.
It might have been Friday night, or the easy dreamy run on partner of so many brilliant sunsets, Saturday morning. The ambulance was there early, in his driveway. Various police and all that. Ralph had shot himself dead.
