Last week down in Atlanta GA they had some weather of the sort that does not normally visit the Peach State. They had snowy ice and icy snow that fell across the town right in the middle of the day.
They don't stockpile road salt down South like we do, in giant roadside igloos filled with sodium chloride. Nor do they have a lot of plows or salt brine mixed with beet juice to pre-treat the highways the way we old Northern salts do.
So Atlanta had a traffic jam the size of, well, Atlanta, and for many thousands of people, it wasn't matter of being a few minutes late for dinner. Some of the stranded motorists didn't get home until dinnertime the next night.
(I will once repeat the good advice to avoid leaving the house in wintertime without having at least a half tank of gas, a blanket, some nutrition, and some water and an extra empty bottle in the car. You'll figure out what the empty bottle is for soon enough.)
But lookie at what this fellow did. Matthew Miller heard that people were stuck in their cars without the vitals and he threw together some sammies and cereal and hot cocoa for people doing the sit and stew near his house. Instead of wishing that someone would go out and help people, he went out and helped people.
We hear about heroes all the time, and I think that someone down in the 404 who knows Mr Miller should give him a fist bump from all of humanity. We need more people like him all over the country.
Also from that storm, as the New York Times here describes, some students had to spend the night in their schools - with the teachers there - which must have been a nightmarish night for all concerned. Just the thought of myself as a grade school boy padding down the hall to the mens' room and running into Miss Van Breeman in the hall would have given me bashful bladder for fifty years.
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