It started snowing Tuesday night. We ran outside, guys in boxers or soccer shorts and maybe t-shirts, girls in t-shirts and pajama pants, and threw snowballs and made snow angels before fleeing back ahead of the frostbite and the girls made hot chocolate we spiked with Jamesons or Kahlua from bottles Froggy'd been hoarding, and when I woke up to head to morning swim practice at 5:43 it was in Becca's bed and the whole world was white. 

By ten in the morning that Wednesday before Thanksgiving almost everyone had cleared out. A huge line of cars with anxious parents was piled in the driveways even as I fought my way back from the pool freezing in the heaviest clothes I owned, a denim jacket over my thickest high school team hoodie.

I hadn't even considered going home. Why the fuck would I? I'd spent the last eight years doing nothing but planning my escape. While it was definitely weird here, it wasn't there. I wanted to be anywhere but there. Classes sucked, except for art, but the drugs were good, the beer flowed, the food was edible, the girls were interested, I liked the movies, my room felt safe. I'd walked the campus those fall days imagining it as home.

That morning I cut the swim short just cause I was desperate for a real hot breakfast. I usually swam from six to eight. You were supposed to get in those morning hours though you could pick your pool. Through September and October I'd gone to the Women's IM Building because the pool had huge arched windows that captured the morning sun. But not today. That pool was a quarter mile further from my dorm than the main pool in the Men's IM, and it couldn't be worth it. I might have gone to the even closer pool under Jenison Fieldhouse, but that was only a little closer and I hated the chlorinated claustrophobia of that old basement. 

The problem with swimming six to eight was that they served real eggs cooked however you wanted them from six to eight Jock dorm. Get ‘em up and fed early. From eight to nine it was down to cereal and yogurt and stuff. As I plowed through the eight inches already on the ground at 5:51 I swore I would be back before eight. And with flash frozen hair I pushed my way into the cafeteria at 7:48, got four sunny-side-up eggs and hot hash browns and thick coffee and fell into a chair by the windows as snow filled the courtyard.

By nightfall I was only one of five on my floor. Fifty-four rooms, me, a soccer player, and three French-speaking guys on the hockey team. There were only about twenty or thirty of us in all of Case Hall out of a few more than a thousand. In-season jocks and out-of-state jocks like me. There weren’t practices but I'd fought my way to the pool again in the afternoon. I came back and got high with Exile on Main Street wailing from the stereo as the endless flow of flakes spilled from the thick, dark sky. At dinner, despite signs telling us there would be food over in the dorm next door for the next few days, cafeteria workers handed out care packages to help get us through to Sunday night.

It wasn't like there was nothing. Two football players from Florida who lived over in Wonders Hall had invited people to a "Thanksgiving Porno Fest" complete with posters involving indiscreet turkeys. The Catholic Student Association suggested I join them for the holiday meal.

One guy up on the sixth floor who I knew only as "Jolly" had psychedelic mushrooms. Still, the holiday began at midnight with me in the second-floor lounge watching Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street on Channel 50 from Detroit. Only me, in sweats and bare feet and my roommate's big afghan in the huge space overlooking a dark lobby.

Thanksgiving morning the snow had piled up to what I'd describe as blizzard levels but it wasn't getting played that way on the radio. I doubled two hoodies, the outer one with very long sleeves to cover my hands. I jammed feet wrapped in two pairs of socks into my Converse All-Stars. I needed to go outside.

It does snow in New York. But this was different. Tiny crystals swept down on me as I pushed through drifts that sometimes rose above my waist. When the wind would break the silence was so deep you could hear the flakes landing, the spill of sugar in a quiet nighttime kitchen. The cold that wrapped me had an edge I'd never felt before.

Where was I going? First I trudged south toward Wilson but the idea of cafeteria food seemed too depressing. So I spun around and headed north. The stadium lost in the white clouds to my right. The outdoor pool nothing more than a giant fog machine. The ice arena a dim outline. And I crossed the river onto the winding paths of the old campus.

No one else was around. No cars moved. I thought briefly of winter clothing. Of big coats and gloves and hats. I'd laughed when I'd seen all that in my dorm-mates' possession, but, ah, they knew something I hadn't. Then I thought of sleds. That was the magic to winter on the steep hills of my neighborhood. I paused near the bell tower and surveyed the landscape. It wasn't pancake flat, but the only imaginable sled spot was the coal pile by the power plant. I watched the snow mounding on the ancient gothic street lights, then noticed the tingling in my toes and decided to press on. 

I drifted along the circular roads until I found myself on the edge of campus across from that Catholic Student Center. I wasn't much for charity, I wasn't much for church, and I surely wasn't much for the kind of losers I figured would be found in a place like this on a day like this. But staring through the snow images played in my head. All the times I'd hidden in churches on dark nights or lost days when I needed a safe place. All the times priests had not asked any questions as I'd slept on the floor of the choir loft. And the sense of family I'd had sitting around the table on Thanksgiving at home in the years when, yeah, there'd been years that weren’t bad. All the way back to walking on a cold November beach with my dad one of those holidays when it was all too much and I couldn't keep it together and he was the good dad and knew I needed to be outside.

I was very cold and felt a very long way from anything.

So I just yelled "fuck it" into the storm and decided on doing it all. The Catholic turkey was damn good. The people were pretty nice. At nightfall the mushrooms were incredible and the soft hallucinations made the Porn Fest more than tolerable, almost entertaining.

On Friday, I took the bus to the store and bought gloves and a jacket. By Christmas I'd added boots and a hat. On Thanksgiving my sophomore year, I cooked turkey for fourteen.

Ira Socol