Well you never know about snowmen. This one turned up with antlers and a copperbottom pot on his frosty pow. Somehow they suit him!

Tim, my son-in-law, looks rather Tolstoyan in his black cap. For all we know, this scene might have come from the Russian steppes! How cool!

The recent snowfall has complicated things for many of us. It takes folks like Tim and Bea to show us that art cannot be suppressed by precipitation.

Since I could not get to work yesterday, I read Elizabeth Bowen's 1937 novel The Death of the Heart. Bowen is noted for her novels set between the first and second World Wars, when cynicism and innocence clashed at the highest levels of society. We are in just such an environment now. Our children deserve the right to a childhood free of anxiety and bewilderment. But how can we give them that when we as adults have become cynical beyond belief? Our innocence died with John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. Many of us have lost our religious faith. Many of us have been the victims of agencies that should have been looking out for our welfare. The AMA? Wall Street? Toyota? They've let us down.

We have to go to the children with their antlered pothead snowmen and say, "We will not let you grow up in a world of falsehood. We will protect your innocence, as ours was once protected. And we will not leave you a legacy of debt and war." And then, we must do what we have promised.