The challenge of being here now and the illusion of ‘Golden Years’ living

I was deeply touched yesterday by two old friends – Paul Mason and Ron Graham – and the insights they shared on Facebook on Paul’s timeline about the reality of aging parents and the choices we all will or have faced as grown sons and daughters in that regard. My friendships with Ron and Paul dates back to the mid-1970s at Trent University in Peterborough, Ont. Almost 50 years on, I still cherish their wisdom and empathy – as well as the ongoing and civil religious debates between us.

As Paul writes, “There’s something unnatural about a community made up predominantly of old people. Yes, there are plenty of young and middle-aged staff, several of whom I’ve come to know and like very much, but everywhere one looks there’s evidence of ill-health and decrepitude. Visiting a seniors’ residence swiftly dispels any illusions one might have about the ‘golden years.’”

At some level, I agree. I, too, think it deeply unnatural that old people live together in community alone. Unless perhaps you don’t have that option.  The Northern Spirit Manor Personal Care Home in Thompson, Manitoba opened months before I arrived here in 2007, built in no small part through volunteer community fundraising. Now, grandparents, and other elders, can remain in the community, closer to their children and grandchildren, an unbroken circle. That matters to us here deeply.

Still, I get the servicing model for older folks, both here and in the south, especially in terms of medical needs, that makes a facility such as where Paul’s mom now resides a reasonable choice. And I also understand there are often difficult, if not near impossible, choices involved. In the Summer of 1989 I was married to Heather, who was accepted into the PhD program in cultural anthropology at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina for September of that year. Heather has gone on to become an associate professor in women’s studies and cultural anthropology at the University of Illinois Springfield.

My parents had moved to Bridgenorth, Ontario in 1980 while we were living in Boston. My mother died in 1986 after a year-long illness. While she spent that year in and out of hospital, she continued to live at home in their apartment in Bridgenorth, just north of Peterborough on Chemong Lake. My father’s homecare efforts, while supported by provincial homecare staff and doctors, still to my mind, became Herculean. My dad’s idea of cooking, up to that point, had been summer barbecuing, which he was quite skilled at. Overnight, quite literally, he took over the marital indoor domestic cooking in the kitchen, as well as cleaning and laundry chores without complaint, and also attending to my mother’s personal needs, while in mixed health at best himself. There was absolutely nothing in my dad’s background up to that point that would have suggested to me he could rise to the occasion such as that. He wasn’t a saint or a martyr, but his unexpected and surprising example still serves as a lodestar pointing to the meaning of unconditional love in my eyes. He continued to live in the apartment in Bridgenorth after my mother died as a widower for three years from 1986 until 1989.

By 1983, we were living in Canada again, and Heather began a master’s program at the University of Western Ontario in London. She spent from September 1983 to August 1984 in London, and then followed me to Toronto and Peterborough for the next five years from 1984 to 1989, as I spent most of the early years of my journalism career at Ontario Lawyers Weekly and the Peterborough Examiner, after starting at The Standard-Freeholder in Cornwall, Ont. in June 1983. We agreed in March 1985, when we moved back to Peterborough, having spent several years there earlier as undergraduates at Trent University, the next move would be where Heather wanted to be, wherever that might be. My dad and Heather got along well. My parents treated her as a daughter, and she was fond of both of them. In fact, in August 1987, my dad was planning a trip to Indiana to visit my Uncle Bob and Aunt Joan. I was working, and Heather’s thesis defence coincided with my dad’s trip, so he drove her to UWO in London, where she showed him all around campus for a day before he continued his journey to Indiana. I chuckled later when he also told me he had got his first VISA card shortly before in 1987 for gas and hotels on the trip, as gas/oil company cards, which he did have a few of, were starting to disappear by the late 1980s.

Fast-forward two years from 1987 to 1989. My dad’s health had declined some, but he was still living in his apartment in Bridgenorth and driving, Heather, meanwhile was on the cusp of starting at Duke in North Carolina. And I was working still at the Peterborough Examiner, faced with the likely choice of being near my spouse, or my father, who was still living at home, but showing signs he might need to move to a retirement home sooner than later. Yet, his decline wasn’t linear, although he was starting to spend more time in hospital by the Spring of 1989; a few days here, a few days there. While he was in hospital for his 70th birthday on July 13, 1989, he was well enough for to go out for a birthday dinner at the Ponderosa Steakhouse on Chemong Road in Peterborough on a day pass. My dad was a Ponderosa aficionado (along with Dixie Lee Fried Chicken). But there were warning bells. Around the same time, he asked for my help for the first-time in his life writing a cheque, in this case to pay his Ontario Hydro Bill.

He died exactly a month later on Aug. 13, 1989. I gave my two weeks notice at the Peterborough Examiner and moved to North Carolina with Heather. I returned to work at the Peterborough Examiner as a reporter in the old Hunter Street second-floor newsroom almost eight years later in April 1997. Jack Marchen was still sitting directly across from me and Phil Tyson beside me.

Back in 1989, Heather and I had spent the summer looking around Peterborough and surrounding area for a possible retirement home for my dad to move to, although we hadn’t reached the point of broaching the subject with him. All of this was a very long time ago (I was 32 years old), but I have two still distinct memories. One is of being overwhelmingly depressed by the cumulative effect of visiting such facilities. The other is a particular memory, although which retirement home it was, mercifully escapes me 34 years later. What I do remember with clarity is seeing a group of retirement home residents at a place Heather and I were checking out, sitting in their wheelchairs in eerie silence, eyes glued to the overhead communal television set. Heather and I used to say afterward, only half-jokingly, that my dad had known when to make his exit.

My own thoughts on aging gracefully, aging well, wherever you may live, might be summarized thusly: If you can, be mellow, be grateful. Much easier said than done, I know from personal experience, if you are sick or otherwise in pain.

First, some words on mellowing with age: As a young reporter, and even much later as an editor, I several times came very close to quitting newspaper jobs as a matter of principle over some story, editorial or column dispute with my bosses. While I still think there are times when that is the only appropriate and ethical thing to do, I have come to realize they are probably few and far between, and ego and arrogance were bigger factors driving my soapbox fury than I realized at the time. 

My gratitude has also increased with age. Reality can be sobering. I have two first cousins who lost their husbands last year and are now widows. In the Knights of Columbus, our fraternal Latin motto is “tempus fugit, memento mori,” which translates in English to “time flies, remember death.” When I was tempted to think of counting a cash drawer at the hotel (regularly) for seven years until last summer, or at the university college library (occasionally) still, as tedious tasks, I usually catch myself and think something to the effect of thank God that I am still blessed with the cognitive skills (aided by a pocket calculator) to count the cash. The late Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh, who died in January 2022 at the age of 95, had many useful things to say over many decades of teaching on mindfulness and seemingly ordinary and mundane tasks. If you’re still able to look them up, count yourself fortunate.

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Witnessing history from Boston: The 1980 Jimmy Carter presidential re-election campaign and the October Surprise that wasn’t to be

I never worked directly for Jimmy Carter. In fact, I have never met him, unlike my friend Art Milnes, a journalist from Kingston, Ontario, who would years later become a cherished personal friend of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. But I did spend the last 2½ months of the 1980 Jimmy Carter presidential re-election campaign working as a supervisor for Cambridge Survey Research, where I oversaw several hundred phone bank employees for Democratic National Committee (DNC) pollster Pat Caddell’s firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Most of our work that autumn was on the Carter campaign and U.S. Senate races.

I was 23 years old and had just moved to West Somerville, Massachusetts and was looking for a job in September 1980. I happened to be walking down the west side of Massachusetts Avenue, near Central Square in Cambridge, on a sunny, but crisp, late summer Boston morning, when I saw a help wanted job ad for interviewers down in a hole-in the-wall basement commercial space below sidewalk level.

I spent my first two days working the phones, polling voters state-by-state. I was then promoted to supervise phone bank interviewers. I remember thinking there apparently really is something to the American Story of meritocracy. My only previous experience in public opinion research had been working a few months earlier in the spring of 1980 on a Quebec Referendum project for a Winnipeg company, Opinion Place/Marketing Insights, as a field interviewer in Peterborough, Ontario for the Center for Canadian Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

My Cambridge Survey Research boss, Mark Leavitt, took me out to my first Boston Red Sox game at Fenway Park to celebrate my promotion. I still remember his pre-game advice: “Make sure there is a full aspirin bottle by the coffeemaker for employees.” Back then, sampling was done with actual physical telephone directories and coding was done largely by hand. One of the curiosities I quickly noticed was that our ASA-and-caffeine-driven phone bank interviewers, if they spent more than a a couple of days working a region, would fairly quickly wind up sounding like the respondents from whatever area code they were calling and interviewing people on their political preferences, especially in smaller and more ethnically homogenous areas of the country. Some kid from Jersey would wind up talking slower and softer, like he was from the lowcountry of  South Carolina, after a few days. By far the most difficult voters to reach were those who had telephone numbers in the hollers of Tennessee and Kentucky. You could call 100 numbers and 99 would be unreachable because of some technical glitch, or simply out of service.

While we knew we were in an uphill re-election battle against Republican challenger Ronald Reagan, I don’t think it was until the last days of the campaign, when we realized there would be no “October Surprise” with the release of the 52 United States diplomats and American citizens being held hostage by Iranian students in Tehran, that we also realized we were going to come up short on election day Nov. 4.

We lost the election. Big time. I well remember going to work a few days after, late in the afternoon, riding above ground aboard a subway car on the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) Red Line “T”. The November sky was a foreboding steel-gray, with leaves all fallen now from the trees. And there it was, as we headed into Harvard Yard, giant spray –painted graffiti on a cenotaph proclaiming “Ray-Gun” had been elected.

After the Carter campaign, I went to work as research associate at Kenyon and Eckhardt (later Bozell, Jacobs, Kenyon and Eckhardt) in Boston. I worked in the research department of the advertising agency’s Boston field office. Major commercial client accounts included airline and automotive companies.

As it turned out, Reagan did have a fondness for his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed Star Wars. But the dreamed-for global missile shield didn’t come to fruition. Instead, Reagan, along with Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, managed to end the Cold War with perestroika [restructuring] and glasnost [openness] becoming part of the everyday vocabulary of Americans by the late 1980s, rolling from their tongues as if they had been saying the two Russian words forever.

As for Jimmy Carter, well, he would go on to become the most consequential and respected former president in United States history. At 98, he is also the oldest-ever former president.

Millard Fuller founded Habitat for Humanity International in 1976. From humble beginnings in Alabama, he rose to become a self-made marketing millionaire at 29. But as the business prospered, his health, integrity and marriage suffered, he noted later. In 1965, Millard and his wife Linda turned away from their millionaire lifestyle and rededicated their lives to serving God.

Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, remain the best-known faces of Habitat for Humanity. Their involvement began in 1984 when the former president led a work group to New York City to help renovate a six-story building with 19 families in need of decent, affordable shelter.

A non-profit, ecumenical Christian housing ministry, Habitat for Humanity seeks to eliminate poverty housing and homelessness and to make decent shelter a matter of conscience and action.

Through volunteer labour and donations of money and materials, Habitat builds and rehabilitates simple, decent houses alongside the homeowner partner families. It is not a giveaway program. In addition to a down payment and monthly mortgage payments, homeowners invest hundreds of hours of their own labour or sweat equity into building their Habitat house and the houses of others. Habitat houses are sold to partner families at no profit and financed with affordable loans. The homeowners’ monthly mortgage payments are used to build still more Habitat houses.

Jimmy Carter is not only finishing well. He started well.

“For myself and for our Nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land.”

Those were the first words spoken by President Jimmy Carter in his inaugural address Jan. 20, 1977. As Art Milnes noted in 2016: “It is often forgotten but President Carter on a January day in 1977 set the gold standard for how a winner treats their opponent. I will let President Ford, who lost that year, tell the rest of the story via his memoirs.”

“Mr. Ford described what happened the day President Carter delivered his Inaugural Address. ‘The weather that morning,’ Ford wrote, ‘was windy and cold, but the atmosphere was full of hope and the crowd that gathered below the East Front of the Capitol reflected that. Chief Justice Burger administered the oath to the thirty-ninth President of the United States.

Carter’s first words were, ”For myself and for our nation I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgD179mgMow). That was so unexpected, such a gracious thing for him to say. The crowd began to applaud, and I bit my lip to mask my emotions. I didn’t know whether to remain seated or to stand. But when the cheers continued I decided to stand and reached over to clasp Carter’s hand.’”

Carter went onto say, “Here before me is the Bible used in the inauguration of our first President, in 1789, and I have just taken the oath of office on the Bible my mother gave me just a few years ago, opened to a timeless admonition from the ancient prophet Micah: “He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.”

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Happy Canada Day from the True North: Land of Back Bacon, Pickerel, the Maple Leaf, Beaver, Moose and Loon, eh

Here’s some food for thought from Ipsos Reid’s annual Canada Day survey conducted between June 12 and June 15 on behalf of Historica Canada, formerly known as the Historica-Dominion Institute, as you get ready to hoist the cold libation of your choice tomorrow to perhaps toast Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, and mark Canada’s 148th birthday.

Historica Canada is a national charitable organization that was launched in September 2009 as the Historica-Dominion Institute, through the amalgamation of two existing organizations: The Historica Foundation of Canada and the Dominion Institute. The Historica Foundation of Canada was launched in October 1999, while the Dominion Institute was formed in 1997 by a group of young professionals, concerned about the erosion of a common memory and civic identity in Canada.

While Ipsos Reid assures us their sample of 1,005 Canadians from Ipsos’ panel interviewed online was weighted to balance demographics “to ensure that the sample’s composition reflects that of the adult population according to Census data and to provide results intended to approximate the sample universe,” I wonder? Does it really matter that much? It’s the all-too-short summer barbecue season in Canada, time to have some fun, without worrying too much about how the sample was constructed. It’s a Canada Day poll after all, not say a … provincial election seats results prediction poll!

Don’t get me wrong. I have worked in public opinion research on-and-off, sometimes between journalism gigs, since 1980, including working as a supervisor for Cambridge Survey Research where I supervised telephone call center employees for Democratic National Committee (DNC) pollster Pat Caddell’s firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the 1980 Carter-Reagan presidential election campaign. Earlier the same year, I worked as a field interviewer in Peterborough, Ontario for Opinion Place/Marketing Insights, a Winnipeg company, doing a 1980 Quebec Referendum survey for the Center for Canadian Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. So when Ipsos Reid says the precision of their Canada Day poll is accurate to a confidence or credibility interval of plus or minus 3.5 per cent, 19 times out of 20, had all Canadian adults been polled with the margin of expected sampling, coverage, measurement and perhaps other errors, as well as a confidence or credibility interval that is wider among subsets of the population, I’m suitably impressed.

And then I go back to the barbecue. Or perhaps my mother’s black cast-iron skillet if it is breakfast time.  Ipsos Reid  says 35 per cent of Canadians named back bacon as Canada’s national food, beating out poutine, named by only 30 per cent, for the top spot this year. Salmon, whether Atlantic or Pacific, trailed at a distant third (personally, I’d have opted for Paint Lake pickerel, a regional delicacy of Northern Manitoba), named by 17 per cent, followed by beavertails at eight per cent; tourtière at six per cent and doughnuts (which is how we’ll spell it for Canada Day) at four per cent.

Other fascinating tidbits include such illuminating facts as only 12 per cent of us have had the opportunity to go out dog-sledding.

When it comes to Canadian symbols, the beaver ranks up with the maple leaf, and 64 per cent of Canadians have seen a beaver in the wild, followed by moose at 60 per cent, edging out loons at 59 per cent and a bear in the wild at 55 per cent. Meanwhile 16 per cent of Canadians say they  have never seen any of these animals,  Ipsos Reid reports. If you live in Toronto or Vancouver, well, take your dog-sledding stats for guidance. Could happen, I suppose, but back bacon is a better bet. Trust me.

Respondents were asked which musician they are proudest to call Canadian. Nearly four in 10  (38 per cent) chose Celine Dion from a list which also included Kingston’s The Tragically Hip (picked by 14 per cent), Nickelback (11 per cent), Blue Rodeo (nine per cent), Drake (six per cent), Justin Bieber (two per cent), or some other musician or group (20 per cent). Given that Neil Young, The Guess Who, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, April Wine, the Stampeders, A Foot in Coldwater and Loverboy, just to name half a dozen or so others, are apparently absent from the top of the list, I’ve concluded this must be the result of the confidence or credibility interval that I mentioned earlier. Or, perhaps more likely even, the fact my tastes in Canadian music apparently haven’t quite arrived in the 21st century yet. A possibility not to be discounted, to be sure.

Five years ago, the Historica-Dominion Institute, in partnership with the Munk School of Global Affairs and with the support of the Aurea Foundation, conducted an online survey, “Canada and the World in 2010,” which was also conducted for it by pollster Ipsos Reid and had more than 18,000 respondents in 24 countries.

The survey found, among many other things, Canadians sometimes overestimate their own influence in world affairs:

While two in three Canadians (67 per cent) agreed in 2010 that Canada had an influence on the world stage, only 55 per cent of global respondents agreed. Those polled in Brazil and India were most likely (both 74 per cent) to agree that Canada had influence in world affairs, while only one third of Japanese and Swedes agreed, making them least likely of the 24 countries polled to believe that Canada is influential on the world stage.

For Americans, Independence Day Saturday on July 4 marks the defeat of the British Redcoats in the War of Independence in 1783, although some Southerners still mourn it as the date in 1863 when Vicksburg, Mississippi fell to Union troops in the War Between the States or Civil War.

Canada being Canada and Canadians being Canadians, we quintessentially mark July 1 with what might appear to outsiders to be a rather odd mix of reticence, pride and ambivalence. Me? I like to recall that it was on Canada Day 2007 I arrived to live in Manitoba!

Sometimes we forget just how remarkable an achievement Canada was in 1867. In the spring of 1864, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island were contemplating the possibility of Maritime Union. But nothing concrete happened until the Province of Canada, springing from the legislative union of Canada East and Canada West, heard of the proposed conference and members of the combined legislature requested permission to attend the meeting of the Maritime colonies, in order to raise the larger subject of British North American union.

Delegates from away arrived by steamer in Prince Edward Island and shared the spotlight with the first circus to visit the island in more than 20 years. No kidding. How absolutely Canadian can you get?

The historic Charlottetown Conference took place from Sept. 1 to 9, 1864. My ancestral Acadian roots are on the saltwater Tantramar marshes of Amherst, Nova Scotia, in Cumberland County on the Isthmus of Chignecto at the head of the Bay of Fundy and Missiguash River, bordering New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and connecting the Nova Scotia peninsula with those who come from away elsewhere in North America. From Amherst came four of the 36 Fathers of Confederation, more than any other city or town in Canada:  Robert Barry Dickey, Edward Barron Chandler, Jonathan McCully, and Sir Charles Tupper, a Conservative who went onto serve as Canada’s sixth prime minister briefly in 1896.  While he was born in Amherst, Chandler was best known as a New Brunswick legislator.

Tupper was also a medical doctor and founded Pugsley’s Pharmacy, dispensing chemists, at 63 Victoria Street East in downtown Amherst in 1843, the same year he became a doctor. Tupper was president of the Medical Society of Nova Scotia in 1863, and was the first president of the Canadian Medical Association from 1867 to 1870. Pugsley’s operated at the same location in the same historic Tupper Block building, as the oldest business in town and one of the oldest pharmacies in Canada, for 169 years until May 2012.

While there are differing historical opinions as to who should be considered a Father of Confederation, traditionally they have been defined as the 36 men who attended one or more of the three conferences held at Charlottetown; Québec City from Oct. 10 to 27, 1864; and London, England from Dec. 4, 1866 to Feb. 11, 1867 to discuss the union of British North America, preceding Confederation on July 1, 1867. Negotiators settled on the name “Dominion of Canada,” proposed by the head of the New Brunswick delegation, Samuel Leonard Tilley.  The word dominion was taken from the King James Bible: “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth” (Psalm 72:8). Tilley, who had a background in pharmacy, became the minister of customs in Sir John A. Macdonald’s first cabinet in 1867.

As a Canadian, it also remains an uncommon privilege for me to have to sat in the public gallery in the balcony of historic Province House in Charlottetown, designed and built by local architect Isaac Smith and completed in 1847, to accommodate the legislative assembly of Prince Edward Island. To this day, the assembly has only 27 seats for the members from the ridings of Souris-Elmira through to Tignish-Palmer Road.

The July 1 holiday was established by statute in 1879, under the name Dominion Day. There is no record of organized ceremonies after the first anniversary, except for the 50th anniversary of Confederation in 1917, at which time the new Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings, under construction, was dedicated as a memorial to the Fathers of Confederation and to the valour of Canadians fighting in the First World War in Europe.

The next celebration was held in 1927 to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation.

Since 1958, the federal government has arranged for an annual observance of Canada’s national day on July 1.

Well done, Sir John A.

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Under the gun: Pennsylvania to Massachusetts about to be hammered by epic winter storm, weather forecasters predict

New York City, Great Blizzard of Dec. 26, 1947

New York City, Jan. 26, 2015

I admit it. It is kind of hard to get too cranked up about bad winter weather elsewhere when you live pretty much at the dead centre of the North American continent here in Northern Manitoba, like I do. The normal daytime high temperature here on Jan. 26 is 0°F with an overnight low dropping to -22°F.

So when I read morning headlines such as, “Historic storm to slam northeast,” I quickly recall earlier similar headlines for Mid-Atlantic stories such as the “snowmageddon” of Feb. 5-6, 2010 that blanketed the Washington, D.C. region under 18-32 inches of snow. Really.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Weather Service defines a blizzard as a winter storm where sustained wind or frequent gusts to 35 miles an hour or greater, with considerable falling and/or blowing snow, reducing visibility frequently to less than a quarter of a mile, are expected to prevail for a period of three hours or longer. NOAA’s National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center at College Park, Maryland predicted this morning at 9:20 a.m. CST that a surface low pressure center near the Outer Banks of North Carolina is expected to intensify rapidly and develop into a major winter storm, heading north from the Northern Mid-Atlantic for New England. It is expected to be a nor’easter just south of Cape Cod, Massachusetts tomorrow morning.

I live in Northern Manitoba now, but I grew up in Oshawa, Ontario, east of Toronto, not so far from Buffalo where lake-effect snow, created when cold low-level wind coming in a direction parallel to the long axis of Lake Erie can maximize the “fetch”, or the time and distance the cold air travels over the warmer body of water – in this case, Lake Erie, of which Buffalo is at the eastern end of. Late autumn and early winter brings the most frequent lake-effect snows off Lake Erie, the shallowest of the Great Lakes, before it ices over and reduces the exposed water surface.  Last Nov. 17, the water surface temperature of Lake Erie was almost 43°F. The air temperature above it was less than 9°F. Over the next three days, some areas around Buffalo were blasted with six feet of snow. Now, that’s what I call “snowmageddon.”

I used to live in Boston in the 1980s and in the 1990s drove by car on at least one return trip every February for three consecutive winters from Trent University in Peterborough in Southern Ontario to Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, south of Washington, D.C., so  I “get it” why the winter storm bearing down today from Pennsylvania to Massachusetts is a big deal. It is part of the Boston-Washington Corridor (also known simply as the BosWash or Bosnywash sometimes, the former coined by futurist George Fieraru in 1967) and the most heavily urbanized region of the United States and stretches on a map almost as a straight line from the northern suburbs of Boston to the southern suburbs of Washington, D.C. in northern Virginia. It includes Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, along with their metropolitan areas and suburbs, as well as many smaller urban centers. With a population of close to 52 million people, the Boston-Washington Corridor comprises about 17 per cent of the U.S. population on less than two per cent the nation’s land area.

About 58 million people are in the storm’s path, which also includes portions of the Ohio Valley, Southern Appalachians and panhandles of West Virginia and Maryland.

Up to three feet of snow is predicted for New York City. The city’s biggest snowstorm was on Feb. 11-12, 2006, when 26.9 inches of snow fell, according to the city’s Office of Emergency Management. The second biggest snowstorm to date in New York City occurred on Dec. 26, 1947, when 25.8-inches of snow fell during what is known now as the Great Blizzard of 1947.

Atlanta-based CNN, well south of the storm track and looking at mainly sunny skies and temperatures of 48°F to 55°F Tuesday through Thursday, had the pithy and perhaps prescient lede this morning that would be hard to top: “Go home. Stay there. Seriously.”

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