Ben Robinson

All About Ben

By Ben Robinson

People are crazy, you know.

Last week, the girl on the Weather Channel came onto the screen. She smiled and said, “It looks like you folks in South Carolina are going to be getting some snow.”

Shame. I was considering making this girl the next Mrs. Robinson, but that one moment ruined that. The babies just wouldn’t work out, probably inheriting her brains and my looks. The poor child would probably be  walking around, scaring people, and wondering why everyone was running from him.

You see, my people in South Carolina don’t want any snow. I realize that her job is to break the news to the public, but she could cushion it, maybe by including other bad news with the weather report, so the news of the snow wouldn’t seem so bad.

“Unemployment is up, the Ravens won the Super Bowl, it’s basketball season for Clemson,” she could say before adding, “Oh, by the way, it might snow in South Carolina.”

But this girl, who would probably be my future wife if I knew her last name, boldly just said it — as if anybody wants snow.

Snow is a four-letter word, and should be treated like many other four-letter words. Snow should not even be mentioned in polite company.

Someone could say, “I’m just afraid it might do the ‘S’ word.”

Snow is bad. It makes it difficult to go anywhere. It makes even walking out to your car a challenge. One wrong step, and suddenly you’re three steps behind where you were. And that’s if you’re lucky.

If you’re not and you fall, immediately everyone in your family is active. They’re trying to get to the closest camera and preserve this moment of misery for years to come. Generations from now, Robinson children will be laughing at how dumb Ben looked laying in misery in the snow.

Years ago, someone in my family realized that we don’t do well in snowy weather. But that person probably realized that since so many of us Robinsons carry our own shade that living in a warmer climate probably wouldn’t be too smart either. So the decision was made to locate in the Upstate of South Carolina, so we would have limited days of snow, but not end up a sweaty, smelly corpse after the summer.

When air conditioning became commonplace, we were discouraged.

“We could have went further South and still have been safe,” our family said.

Of course rumors of global warming got us excited, as logically such a trend would mean we would have to deal with less snow. But before long we realized that “global warming” was really just a trend of people being fatter, so they didn’t get as cold.

So for now, we still have to deal with the cold. We thought of relocating to Florida, but several local communities have banned my family from moving there because our bodies have never been described as “looking like a swimsuit model’s.”

The good news is that we only have a few more snow storms remaining this year. Sure, it’s been known to snow in late March, but that’s rare, and the warmer weather keeps snow from staying around very long.

Soon we will be back to a hot, sweaty summer, and we will be happy again.