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| Milk Wood |
Complete disaster!
The snow machine had painted the alley in white and no one could go in or come
out. What made it even worse was the sharp contrast between the narrow dirty
dead end and the shiny whiteness of the snow. The neighbors were thrilled by the
commotion! The last time they had this much fun was back in 1954 when Tommy, the
baker’s youngest kid, decided to steal all the bras drying in the sun and run
in circles in the alley holding them as if they were gigantic parachutes much
to the mortification of their owners. Mr.
Robbins, who had rented the machine, was utterly humiliated. He simply could
not grasp how such an efficient machine (he was a firm believer in mechanized
modernity) had embarrassed him to this point. He even avoided looking up at
Mrs. Peterson’s window, the frisky widow he had been trying to impress for the
last couple of months and for whom he had organized this, let’s say, snowy event.
It was to be a magical afternoon with snow falling just for Mrs. P. Little did
he know that the darn machine would fail him so miserably. Today, as I sit here
and write this story as it was told to me so many times by my mother, I still
wonder how that dirty alley looked in white. My mother always added at the end of
the story that “somehow painting the alley white did impress the widow, and she
and Mr. Robbins found their way into each other’s lives; in a strange twisted
way, modernity had not failed after all!”
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