Once upon a time, in the frozen wastes of a suburban backyard that was buried under 2 feet of snow after a monumental blizzard, there lived Flaky the Snowman, who was so puny, so pathetic, but still so lovable that he could melt your heart if you met him.
I not only met this snowman, I made him with my own hands. As my wife, Sue, said after the flaky guy was finished, “Frosty would be embarrassed to be seen with him.”
Since I was suffering from brain freeze, which happened quickly because my brain is the size of an ice cube, and inspired by the famous “Frosty the Snowman” tune, I came up with a song for the little fellow:
"Flaky the Snowman
Was a silly lump of ice.
With a pair of shades and a floppy hat,
He was dumb and short and nice."
And little he was: 1-foot-3 in his stocking feet. Or he would have been if he had feet.
I envisioned a much larger creation when I trudged through my winter blunderland in the hope of building a snowman that would become a legend in my own mind.
The problem, I immediately found out, was that the snow was powdery. That’s fine for skiing (I never took up the sport, even though I’ve been going downhill for years), but it wasn’t so good for packing and rolling the three balls — large bottom, medium midsection and small head — needed to make a perfectly proportioned precipitation person.
The fact that I hadn’t built a snowman since woolly mammoths roamed the earth didn’t help matters.
But I was determined to create a cool dude that would impress neighbors, visitors or anyone who didn’t mistake him for a burglar and call the cops.
I started by gathering the stuff I would need for limbs and facial features. For the limbs I chose — you guessed it — limbs. Actually, they were a pair of twigs that Sue broke off a fallen tree branch. She also gave me a carrot for the nose and a bunch of purple fish bowl pebbles for the mouth. For the eyes, I got two wine corks on which I drew pupils.
The finishing touches were a pair of sunglasses and a hat like the one Bill Murray wore in “Caddyshack.”
Now all I had to do was make the body.
“I can’t pack the snow,” I told Sue.
“You have to roll it into a ball,” she said.
“It’s falling apart,” I complained.
Suddenly, a rare thought crossed my cranium and I snapped my fingers, which didn’t work because I was wearing gloves.
I got a watering can, filled it with vodka (sorry, I mean water) and poured the liquid over a patch of snow.
I couldn’t get the ball rolling, but I managed to pack enough snow for a lumpy base. Then I made a misshapen head and attached it to the deformed body.
The snowman couldn’t give me the cold shoulder because he didn’t have one.
But he did have arthritic arms (the twigs), an orange nose (the carrot) and a sly smile (another twig, which replaced the totally unusable pebbles).
I ditched the cork eyes and stuck on the shades. Then I topped him off with the hat.
“Your snowman has nothing on Frosty,” Sue declared.
But he did impress a couple of young guys who came over to clear the driveway and shovel the walks.
“He’s great,” said Justin Felix, 20, who co-owns North Coram Snow Removal. “Just like people, snowmen come in all shapes and sizes.”
“He’s pretty cool,” said Matthew Owens, also 20. “I like the hat and the nose. And the shades are a nice touch.”
The next day, a cable company contractor arrived to take care of a sagging wire.
“That’s a nice little snowman,” said Ryan Howell, 23. “It’s better than what I could do. I’ve never made one. You did a good job.”
A few days later, rising temperatures and falling rain spelled the end for Flaky.
I looked out the window and sang:
“Flaky the Snowman
Was a puny guy, I’d say.
But we had some fun, he was number one,
He’d beat Frosty any day.”
