I had gotten back in touch with a girl (who once bore the burnt of my musings) earlier today, and she invited me to come out of my hotel-burrow to meet her and her husband. Given that I was cooped up all afternoon in my room, I had no idea that a mini snowfall was being brewed outside by the weather gods as I stepped out of the doors.

In the first instance, I was semi-leery of walking out into the steadily falling snow but when I returned to my room and put on my -20 C snow shoes expressly purchased for such weather conditions, I felt more confident as I wandered out into the windless snowfall. Few things I noticed or discovered as I was churning through the snow: the music of snow falling, the beauty of color white, the way other pedestrians loom in and out of the gray distances as if they were boats coming and leaving a harbor enveloped with mist.

Then as I got closer to my destination, the snow intensified, and I walked down a wrong street off Bloor, for a mile or so into a steady wind, which whipped snow off the street into the face, which obviosuly hurt like a bitch. And my glasses started getting crusted over with this white matter, and I realized I was pretty much random walking through snow drifts with a minor panic ringing in my ears.

I can now finally understand the Jack London-ish adage which roughly says it is not the cold which kills you as much as the panic that precedes it. At ths point, I took shelter into a helpfully placed public telephone booth and started Googling the address on my Blackberry. Of course by the time I got my bearings, my bare wet hands froze, and putting them back into the gloves involved these operations with the mouth.

Thankfully, I got to the meeting place without any further unintended detours, had some great beer and food with two very engaging conversationalists, always worth most snowy struggles, and walked back here, to my desk, on an absolutely still and snowbound Bloor Street. There is poetry in this but I don't have a muse tonight into whose ear I can whisper some of the fifty-two names (few which I looked up now: massak, mauja, qaniit) Eskimos have for snow*.

Goodnight.

* Even if this is a journalistic or a literary cliché, it is a lovely cliché.