Miracle on 174th Place: Blizzard Brings Strangers Together

I only knew two things about the residents of Chicago's south suburbs when I moved here for work in the fall: Folks aren't as stuck up as they are in the northern 'burbs, but they are unfortunately Sox fans.

But I dutifully moved for my new position, taking a spot in a great apartment positioned dish-rattlingly close to the Metra tracks. And I would nod at the fellow residents of my apartment building and smile, sometimes hold a door if I was pretty sure I wasn't letting in a burglar. Mostly I knew them by whether or not they made noise after 10 p.m. or by seeing the names marked on the detergent bottles in the laundry room.

The last two days dumped 16 inches of snow on Tinley Park, my own little corner of the Southland. With drifting, blowing and I'm sure those freakin' Metra trains are to blame somehow, drifts in my apartment building's lot reached seven feet in spots.

As I was updating my Facebook status to say that the snow-shoveling was the universe's way of punishing every homeowner who has chuckled condescendingly at apartment dwellers or said, "When you settle down more, you'll of course want to own," I got a knock on my door. It was the inner door that goes to the shared stairwell and not to outside. It was a stranger. He said to help.

Every person in the apartment building spent the next hour outside digging out cars. The building's property manager, it turns out, was snowed in. Someone either knew or paid a guy with a Dodge Dakota and a plow attachment to clear out the lot, if we got our cars out of the way.

The most important word in the previous paragraph is "every." Everyone in the building has a car – you can't not have a car in the suburbs, north or south. And every car was moved. We grumbled and moaned about the person who came out about a half-hour late, but we still cleaned off her car for her so she could pull out.

We dug out the snowplow when it got stuck. When we didn't have enough shovels (Why would apartment dwellers need shovels?), one woman went to the house across the street and borrowed shovels from them. We swept off strangers' cars, pushed and rocked stuck vehicles until they could get where they were going.

And we all did it together.

Granted, this story would have a more poetic, happy, made-for-TV-movie-starring-George-C.-Scott-in-his-later-years ending if I had gotten anybody's name or if anyone had asked for mine.

But even if I only know these people as the girl who sweet-talked the neighbors or as the guy who helped push the car and if they only know me as the guy who tried to shovel with a broom, I think when we nod or hold open doors, we'll do it with a bit more kindness now.

For a stranger in the Southland, just that means a lot.