I would like to address an issue that seems to be becoming more prevalent recently. We have had very difficult storms recently to cope with. And as I chopped the ice from my car, I wondered how other single women were handling problems incurred with the recent storms.

There are many senior citizens, widows, single women in every town in this county as well as Levittown. But I noticed with this recent storm, that for some reason, healthy male residents, male junior and senior high school athletes as well as male college athletes seem to disappear in times of weather difficulties. I have seen elderly women climbing over snow piles, brushing off their cars with brooms and sponge mops, attempting to chop ice with shovels, while all around them ... driveways and cars with healthy men are spotlessly clean, salted, sanded ... Now, when did they do that ... in the middle of the night? And have they been snow-blinded so they cannot see the woman across their street, or next door, trying to scrape off the ice on her doorway or the roof of her car? Where are all these healthy male school children that these women have put through school by paying school taxes without complaint? Do they mysteriously disappear or go south like the birds ... They can scramble on a football field, jump through hoops and wrestle like champions ... but lose all their agility when ice and snow storms come. One of my neighbors is on oxygen (a male), no one tapped on his door with their shiny snow blowers in their other hand, to ask if he needed help. And that is only one person I know about.

Kindness, caring, sharing; what happened to it? Have men become so very jaded that they forgot they were once our "Knights in Shining Armor?"

I do know that this does not apply to those men who have come to the assistance of their neighbors ... there are still some "Knights," but like King Arthur and Galahad, they are few and far between, and are becoming the thing legends are made of.

Maria Hughes