Glazed

After three days of dire warnings by local meteorologists, a much-hyped weather system has left us with nothing but a dusting of snow and a thin coating of ice. What a buzz-kill.

Most of the schools in the area -- last I looked, more than 200 -- have delayed the start of classes, and a few even closed. Our spawns' schools will open as usual. Bad luck, that.

Mrs. KintlaLake called a little while ago to tell me that our driveway, which slopes down toward the road, was "a disaster" when she left for work. I took the hint, putting down about 20 pounds of ice-melt before our 17-year-old and his friend headed off to school.

Part of me wanted to use the slick surface as a sort of driver-education tool...but then I envisioned two teenagers' cars sliding out into traffic...besides, our spawn just got his wrecked car fixed...

You get the idea. I salted the driveway.

While watching the list of school closings scroll across the bottom of our TV screen this morning, I tried to raise a childhood memory of the phrase, "two-hour delay." My best recollection is that our school district was either open or closed, period, with news of the latter coming to us by way of a phone call or the local AM radio station.

A "delay" was when the bus was late.

I acknowledge that this is a more cautious, more litigious society than the America of 40 years ago, and I understand why districts delay rather than close -- they're allotted a limited number of "calamity days" to use before being required to extend the school year, and pushing back the bell by an hour or two doesn't count against that number.

So yes, I get it. I reserve the right, however, to be incurably cranky about what passes for a "calamity" these days.

We used to call them "snow days," but should two inches of snow close schools in Ohio? (In New Orleans, maybe, but not here.) What about dense fog? High winds? Heavy rain? Thunderstorms? Sub-zero temperatures?

Pull-eeze.

Most of what I know about dressing myself for winter weather came from long, cold waits for the school bus. The experience also taught me when to come in out of the rain and, radical as it sounds, when to wear a damned raincoat.

I had one bus driver pretty much throughout my primary-school days. Five days a week, this stout dairy farmer would get up long before dawn and help with the milking before starting her first bus route -- and most mornings she drove two routes, sometimes three. She had no trouble driving a school bus in snow and ice because her family's livelihood depended on her being able to drive tractors and farm trucks in all kinds of weather. And far from being the exception, she was typical of our district's drivers.

We humans tend to rise or fall with what's expected of us. We learn, adapt, perform and achieve in direct correlation to what life throws our way. This morning's events got me thinking, in my sidelong fashion, about expecting more of school-bus drivers -- right along with teachers, parents, merchants, public officials and, most important, our children.

I may have come to parenting relatively late in life, but the first step, it seems to me, would be to stop shielding our kids from everyday challenges. If we give them opportunities to be uncomfortable -- cold, wet, hungry, thirsty, or even poor -- they'll be more receptive to learning (or more inclined to teach themselves) how to avoid (or accept) that discomfort.

Only by allowing a child to fail, guided by our constructive support, do we equip them to succeed.

We might not be able to keep an entire generation from going soft, but at least we can disrupt the institutional pussification of our own kids.

(As for "soft," I'm sure that our parents said the same about us.)