Ryan vs. The Driveway: A Story of Love and Underdog Triumph

I feel like the best way I can describe the weather of Connecticut right now is that it is essentially behaving like I behave on a bad date: abysmally, in the hopes of scaring off company without actually having to put in the effort of articulating a dismissal. It’s almost as though Connecticut (and yeah I guess these other states up here) is actively trying to confront humanity over the long-ago idiocy that spurred us to colonize this far north.

Of course as I write this it is absolutely balmy out (an apology that I am not ready to accept), but previous to this morning the world was essentially composed of varying shades of gray. Everything. Gray. Even things that are incontestably colorful were gray. That bright red car that is always parked just sliiiiightly on your property line? Gray with a hint of blush.  The crushed cans of soda eternally lolling about in the dimpled parking lot of Walmart? Horribly depressed despite their candied varnish, which is applied over gray metal. My sparkling personality? Saturnine with sporadic hues of half-hearted attempts at warmth, but only when someone talks to me directly. Which is rare.

It’s rare because for the past week the only consistent interaction I have had is with my driveway. I feel like this strip of asphalt and I have transcended the usually thin association we’ve maintained for years, and now we’re old lovers who know so much about each other’s moments of weakness and frustration that our love has grown tempered and timeless. I feel like I have to defend it against people that don’t understand it.

“Your driveway is covered in ice,” a neighbor might say. “Trapped,” I would retort, choking back tears. “It’s trapped beneath ice, and your freeze-dried capacity for empathy is only making things worse!”

I’ve risked my life for that driveway. I’ve done absurd things. Like, just the other day, I sat in front of my snowblower and hacked at the ice that had congested the blades. I had a whole arm in there at one point. I wasn’t even wearing gloves! Of course the machine was off but what if a gasoline leak had left a small stream down the side of the snowblower, and a puddle of gasoline sat just beneath it, and my tinkering caused a spark and the thing blew up in my face? Then it’d be impossible to get the driveway done, and all my neighbors would laugh at me.

That didn’t happen. Remember: I am college educated. Instead I got the thing working and took it on a meandering tour of my driveway, casting snow this way and that way while I pretended like I had some sort of route in mind.

While I was being dragged through the slush and ice, I idyll wondered if my neighbors (all of their driveways clean, black, and evil) were gathering their children and pointing at me out the window. I imagined them popping popcorn and calling up one another, amassing my audience. I then imagined that slowly, house by house, the adults were turning to the children and saying, “This is what happens when you don’t plan. This is the sort of toiling that will befall you if you do not learn basic geometry, or complete enough mazes on the back of cereal boxes. Don’t be like this. Don’t be Ryan.” They would speak these words while jabbing a finger against the window’s frosty glass, and the children would focus on my wretched figure in the distance, and they would just barely be able to hear my sobs as I cursed god.

Secretly, though, I would know the jokes on them, because I wasn’t sobbing: I was singing all the words to ABBA’s ‘Dancing Queen’ that I could remember (so essentially just “You can dance, you can jiii-HIVE, having the time of your li-ii-iiiifee, oooooo!”). But I wouldn’t let them know that  I knew they were watching. I’d put on a show, because it’s good to teach your children lessons at someone else’s expense. “Don’t be like that, because then someone comparable to me, your parent that you love, will shame you from afar to their children.”

My driveway and me? We’re a team. We’re not the prettiest team, but at least we’re happy. Really it’s only a matter of time before I’m able to use our struggles as fodder for one of those Super Sad Backstories that have become requisite to participate on American Idol. Oh, your whole family was fused together after falling in a vat at an ice cream factory? Oh, as part of your work at a convention center you had to staff an Anime Convention? Well too bad, suckers. I had to shovel a driveway like three times in one week. Don’t talk to me about strife. Don’t even go there.

America could learn a lot from me. That’s all I’m saying.