During the storm in Ohio, I turned a few times to the local stations to watch the on-going storm coverage. Except that there was none. Unlike here in New England where a snow storm brings on a "crisis management" mentality and Chuck and Natalie and Jack and Liz and whomever take over the air waves to practically cover every snowflake and where it lands, the folks in Ohio just seemed to take the storm in stride. No all day newscast, no sense of emergency. Life goes on, even when it snows.
I guess the contrast has something to do with how you understand reality. Here in commuter mad, get ahead mad, nothing can stop us New England, we rage at Mother Nature for having the audacity to interrupt our lives, inconvenience our careers, force us to stop and go slow. Out where I'm from, where you can see the storm coming 15 miles away across the beautiful flat land, no one gets in a terrible hurry to do much of anything. Hey, if it snows, just wait. Whatever you had to do will still be there tomorrow.
It is just amazing how different the pace of life is back in the Midwest than here in New England. Here everyone has schedules and datebooks and e-mail and beepers and has a compulsive need to "get things done." We have gadgets to teach us how to run our gadgets and we have supervision so we can stay on top of things and we have meetings so we can get "everyone" on board. We New Englanders make sure we get paid for whatever services we render and get huffy when our grades or evaluations are late or when someone fails to return our always urgent phone calls.
You may laugh at how much I talk up the difference between here and Ohio, but story ought to suffice. In June, we are moving into my father-in-law's house which we bought last summer. Since we had some time between Christmas and New Year's, my wife decided it was a great time to pull up a carpet since she wanted the beautiful hardwood floors to shine when we move in. They are red oak and my once-upon-a-time carpenter now football coach brother-in-law said we had gotten $5,000 richer because you would have to pay that much or more to have red oak floors put in.
Anyway, we decided to consult a floor cleaner to see how much it would cost us to have the floors refinished. My wife found one and he came over and looked at the floors and gave my wife an estimate. He couldn't get to them right away and my wife explained that we were in town for only a week, so could we arrange something. To which the old gentleman said that he would come in a few weeks (get the key we left with a neighbor) do the floors and leave us a bill on the kitchen table. He told my wife we could pay the bill in June when we moved in!
We were flabbergasted. We laughed later when we tried to guess what person or store or company in Worcester or Holden who would have done what this kind man did in beautiful downtown Urbana, Ohio. We couldn't name one. It was one more example of how laid back people are back there in flatland. They take life as it comes and try not to get worked up over much of anything. So it snows; it will stop eventually. Can't pay right away; that's ok, you can pay when you can. Maybe there is something we can all learn about taking things a little slower and trusting a little more.
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