Missy and the Strange Snows of Lemming Idaho

6/12Jan04..Tales from the Gonzo Literati

Missy had never seen chartreuse snow...or pink, or royal blue, much less the peppermint stripped or pastel plaid kind. Neither had the mayor of Lemming Idaho.

She could not remember for the entire eight years of her life, ever dreaming about snow in any color except that monotonous, boring, disgustingly...always the same...white.

But then that one night, three days after christmas way back in 1956...Missy was 8 and soundly dreaming about building a huge snowman out on the lawn...rolling gigantic balls of crunching snow with that mean bugger Ronnie from down the next block, when she discovered that the snow in her dream mittens was purple, lavender, chartreuse.

The next day she woke up and peered out her bedroom window and every bit of fresh snow that had fallen that night was exactly that color.....the first purple snow in Lemming, Idaho.

Missy couldn't believe her eyes...neither could anyone else in Lemming.

The chartreuse dot of lavender snow was barely visible from Sputnik. But the pilot of that mornings airline flight from Portland, over Lemming and onto Chicago saw it...big time. So did all his passengers. From 30,000 feet, it looked like someone had dropped a sack of purple baking flour out of the baggage compartment that hit about dead center on Missy's house and fluffed the town of Lemming with powdered chartreuse that just kind of faded out, tapered from purple to dull white around the town's edge. From their seats, it kind of looked like a fuzzy paste on purple dot on the Idaho countryside.

But the color on the ground was a perfect match to the color in Missy's dream...and something inside her knew it...even though she also knew that this was something she really needed to keep secret.

Missy couldn't tell when the dreams of colored snow would come. but she soon learned to smile in her sleep when she saw Lemming in another dream-snow color, because, without a doubt the next morning she and Ronnie would be playing in it...and they did.

After about round three or four of episodes of waking up to phone calls about the pink, lavender, blue or mint-green snow...the mayor of Lemming Idaho and his greedy little band of snarling, sniveling, republican, conservative, shallow, boring, rigid, mean-spirited, low-IQ, zero imagination main-street business merchants decided they could capitalize on the tourism aspect of this phenomenon none of them could explain. Pretty soon, every radio station in Idaho had a Lemming snow-color report on the morning news.

Over the years, Lemming boomed, Missy grew and the single color snowstorms manifested into green/white peppermint swirls, rainbow stripped blankets across the hills, madras plaids and swirls in the town park. One night Missy dreamed of a snow storm where every single snowflake was a different color....and that morning....it was.

That was when the snow colors stopped. MIssy woke with a strange new sense of fullness budding in her chest. Puberty took over her life, the storms faded and that mean, ornery Ronnie took on a whole new meaning in her life.

That's why all the stores on main street in Lemming Idaho are boarded up now...all these years later....and the only people left are gnarly old drunk republican red-necks riddled with booze, cigarettes and boring stories about the days of colored snow....which of course, nobody these days will believe. Try as they will, the best they seem to come up with is a few yellow puddles in the vast sea of monotonous white....some looking strangely like shaky attempts to write something on the snow banks along Lemming's alleyways. And, I guess, that they can do.

Missy these days..years later.... is the luscious middle-aged graying librarian down here in the suburbs of Tucson ..years after she left Ronnie and Lemming Idaho. Here we're all thankfully safe from any kind of snow, and because of that, it doesn't even matter what color.

Be careful what you dream. Be thankful for what you get. Life is a stream of constantly moving surprises. Our only choices are whether or not we keep moving with them. Nowadays, the snows seldom vary from monotonous white caught in the grips of December deep in the backwoods sometime, somewhere in the chill winter's heart of Idaho.

But down here in the warm desert of Tucson, Arizona, I could ask Missy out for a cappuccino. She has a full head of that most gorgeous naturally graying hair that is so charming and alluring on matured and seasoned women. It has that magic luster cream rinse and phony (quote) "natural" hair dyes and shampoos constantly fail to imitate. It shines with the robustness of her full life. The tones in her hair are like kaleidoscopes in black and white...from sparkling silver, through a thousand shades of gray to jet black. There is nowhere on her head that's boring....in contrast to the suspiciously boring monotochromatics impaled with lethally toxic synthetic toxins and dyes (if you really think your hair dye is safe and natural, drink a bottle of it and call me in two hours) heads of boringly single colored middle aged black, red and blond-haired women who have been duped horrifically and sinisterly by Proctor and Gamble into swabbing their scalps weekly with chemical toxins that sink over an inch through their skin past the bone morrow in their skulls and come, over time, to slosh freely in the fluid and tissue of their cerebral cortex is doing everything they can on the way to prevent being intercepted by that miraculous chain of lymph nodes whose job it is to intercept and enshroud body toxins with their rosary chain system strung from their scalps, down their necks and encircling their breasts and branching down the underside of both arms....all because American chemical corporation marketing departments have saturated our female culture with the terror of being labeled an "old hag" if even a sliver of gray gets through....resulting in 125 million American women who live in daily terror of their roots turning up gray.

I can't sleep or make love with over-heating women with that kind of synthetic solvent and concoctions outgassing from their hair. I go into asthmatic constriction when I breathe them. I have a real challenge looking at a middle aged women with dyed hair...hopefully now with a wealth of understanding and experience and conclusions to share..... and come up with any kind of effective reasons for trust in what they can say...given their obvious reticent to be honest about the natural maturing, growth and health of that gorgeous tapestry that in our native state drapes and graces the feminine mind.

But I hang on every word that comes from Missy. She's obviously real, determined, content and believable, healthy and wouldn't be a source of poison in my immune system if she ever decided to actually manifest one of my increasingly bubbly and simmering fantasies. She speaks words that fall like winter thunder on my heart...like..."how are you today"...or "oh, I'm afraid you have a small fine here". She is so profound and unquestionable.

I've gone through the entire 300 tape video section of the Tucson library one film at a time for no other reason than to talk to her twice on every visit. I take each film home for their requisite 5 days. If I'm starving for a dose of her presence, I sometimes cut it to two or three and pretend I'm a speed viewer of immeasurable absorptive capability....a joke given the carefully disguised fact that it often takes me two days to remember where I put my goddamned day timer.

I don't even have a video recorder to play the Tucson Library video collection on. They just sit there on my "go back shelf" waiting to create my own little level of subterfuge, false self-image and brazen dishonesty myself. Then I walk back in and lay them on the desk in front of her instead of dumping them in that cold stainless steel box in the wall outside. That way I get to be close to her twice on every trip to the library.

I keep thinking I'll muster the courage to ask her out for cappuccino. But every time, her eyes melt me and that fills me with a huge volume of fear and the words choke in my throat. It's easier just to pretend that I'm a mature, middle aged, balding intellectual of inscrutable thoughts, lofty values and above base-level attractions to gorgeous gray librarians.

It's much safer that way.

I don't think she knows that I know about her past and the true origins of the colored snows in Lemming Idaho. I'm the only other creature on the planet besides her that does. Her secret, of course, is incredibly safe with someone like me....and I guess probably yours would be too.