Christmas and cold snaps in Colorado

The day we left for our annual pre-Christmas visit with my daughter, Debby, in Boulder, Colo., a headline in the Los Angeles Times told us that a man had frozen to death in downtown Denver the night before. The story that followed predicted matter-of-factly that temperatures above zero during our arrival day would be considered a heat wave.

Welcome to Colorado.

Since I don’t ski and I’ve devoutly embraced the relative warmth of Southern California exclusively during the winter months after spending most of my first 40 years surviving the rugged winters of the Midwest, I don’t own much in the way of clothing for zero-degree weather. So I packed an extra sweater to wear under my heaviest jacket, which is just right for early spring baseball games at Anaheim Stadium. For all I know, the poor guy who froze to death might have been dressed more warmly than I would be in my travel outfit.

Well, I never unpacked the extra sweater. The temperature flirted with 40 degrees our first day in Boulder, and before we returned home last Sunday, the temperature was in the mid-50s, the residue of snow had mostly melted and I was throwing off covers at night.

All this reminded me of the e-mails and phone calls we get when a 3.8-magnitude earthquake in distant California mountains is reported in Eastern newspapers as a major disaster and family and friends call to find out if we survived. Cold waves in the East and Midwest tend to get over-reported at about the same level in California.

Since I know I’ll be away from it in a few days, I always hope for snow on this annual trip, and all we got this time was blackened slush. I pointed out to Sherry -- who grew up in Costa Mesa and tends to picture snow only in its pristine state, as on Christmas cards -- that clean urban snow often ends as ugly slush. She made no visible effort to extract the clear moral from this information.

But everything else in Boulder was resplendent, as always. And I saw it for the first time in many years through eyes free of cataracts. The snow on the foothills behind Boulder glistened, and the winter colors were much richer and more clearly defined than my imagination had pictured them. I wondered, as I soaked up these discoveries, whether I could ever learn to apply this new breadth of vision to human affairs as well as to nature.

As part of our usual ritual, I bought the Christmas (not “holiday”) tree, then was allowed to watch while the others decorated it. Scheduling problems made it impossible for my two grandsons -- one in his senior year at George Washington University, the other working in radio in San Francisco -- to be there when we visited. We missed them very much but still managed a weekend filled with fine food and drink and talk and just hanging out. In that delightful process, there were a few surprises worth noting.

First, for about half the normal fare, we flew on a weekday night -- and would probably do it again even without the break in fare. We arrived at John Wayne Airport early for an 8 p.m. flight, expecting the usual check-in delays. Instead we found an eerily near-empty terminal and virtually no security line. The plane was almost full, but we seemed to be about the only people up at that hour. It was a late pick-up for my daughter, but she didn’t seem to mind.

The Denver airport was also almost empty, and the traffic between Denver and Boulder comfortably light. Most of the discomforts inherent in travel today were mercifully missing.

In one of our junkets to downtown Boulder, we fed a street parking meter with all the quarters we had, which turned out to be not enough. When we got back to our car, we had overstayed the meter, but instead of a parking ticket on the windshield, we found a printed card with this note: “We saw that your meter was close to expiring. The Downtown Boulder community appreciates your patronage so we have added an extra 15 minutes to your meter. We hope it was enough.”

It was. We thank the Boulder meter fairy and wonder if the various business communities in Newport-Mesa might profitably explore similar small acts of kindness for their customers. The city of Newport Beach might even consider providing its street sweepers cheerful little notes to leave on wayward windshields instead of tickets in my neighborhood.

Then there was the surprise and pleasure of running into an old friend. Right beside the lead editorial in the Boulder Daily Camera was a column by Robert Scheer -- recently fired by the Los Angeles Times but clearly holding forth in the red state of Colorado. He was in good form, and I know now where I can seek him out when I get a serious case of the blands.

The big story in the Daily Camera while we were visiting was the firing of the University of Colorado football coach, Gary Barnett. Virtually the entire front page of the main news section was devoted to this highly controversial decision, which only goes to prove that the head honchos at the Pilot are not the only editors who stress keeping it local.

One of the recurring technical problems of this pre-Christmas visit has always been how to get back home with the gifts we acquire. As purists, we never open them until Christmas day, so they are all appropriately wrapped.

Of course we bring gifts with us also, but somehow they never turn out to be as bulky as those we bring home. That was especially true this year because I had been heard complaining that I had somehow lost my basketball, so I was given a new one. Mercifully, it was not gift-wrapped, but it posed problems that might have stumped even Santa Claus.

But we managed, and the basketball will be under our tree when we start this process all over again at home -- accompanied by a lot of warm memories of an early Christmas in Colorado.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column appears Thursdays.

20051215gzs0vnke(LA)