by Pete Bodo
I wish I could adequately describe the look of dumbfounded amazement on cowboy Luke's face as I walked him to the living room window this morning, showed him the handiwork of last night's snowstorm, and asked him to guess what that mean. . . He took a few stabs at it (I have to wear my boots? The taxis are all white instead of yellow?) as I let the momentum deliciously build to the point where I uttered those words so beloved to anyone who grew anywhere that winter is cold and snowy. . . Snow Day!
Ah, the sheer joy those two words inspire in the hearts of younglings. Snow Day. It means staying in your pajamas until 10 or 11 AM, and an extra mug of hot chocolate. It means a whole hour of morning cartoons (unless, of course, you're trying to turn your kid into a socio-path or morose know-it-all by forcing him to watch something "educational"), or whatever it is that passes for fun instead of socially-mandated drudgery in your household. And, of course, it means venturing out later in the day, towing a sled or snow saucer, fully clad for winter sports combat, and thinking - Wow, and I could be in school today!
There must be a God.
Snow Day, in fact, is such a rare treat that I still have a clear recollection of a few from my own childhood, which was back in the pre-Patagonia and Thinsulate days when winter pretty much meant that your feet, usually clad in leather shoes and thin socks, were wet pretty much from early November until the first daffodils popped in the garden. My most vivid memory is of one of those grand March snowstorms that must have dumped two feet of snow overnight in our little corner of blue-collar, industrial New Jersey. Somehow, my kid sister Susie and I had scraped up something like a dollar, and we trudged through rapidly melting snow, in intense sunshine, to what was a pretty thriving, and ever wondrous (the way "downtown" is always wondrous to kids, because every downtown at that time had at least one of each of two critical commercial establishments: the dedicated toy store (our town, Passaic, had two), and the sporting good store, where you could get anything from fishing rods to baseball mitts to pocket knives to. . . tennis rackets.
Oh what an exquisite pleasure it was to visit those places, if only to look longingly that things we (or at least I) really wanted, but realized I'd probably never get. A sleek looking Raleigh 10-speed bicycle, with those total cool Ram's head handlebars (try as I might, I never could figure out how you were supposed to actually grip those handlebars; they were a visual oxymoron). A plastic "burp gun" (patois in that era for a machine gun) that made a dull rat-tat-tat sound, and featured a bright red plastic tip that pumped like a small piston at the tip of the muzzle, in time to the rat-tat-tat. . . And Susie, no problem! I got clear of her thanks to the doll department, and she interfered not at all with my fantasies of single-handedly wiping out battalion of well-armed enemy, or whizzing past very pretty, stuck-up Virginia Stewart's house on my 10-speed and barely acknowledging with the briefest flicker of a hand, because I was a boy on the go, fast, determined, undeniably cavalier.
After our fantasy tour, Susie and I pooled our dough and bought two industrial-size chocolate bars (remember, this was back in the day when the family-size Nestle's Crunch bar was the size of a placemat, and cost something like a quarter). We trudged home through what was by then knee deep water, with the Spring sun beating down on our cheeks, and happy we were!
Anyway, I'll be working from home today. We may have a chat session later, it depends partly on how successful I am in keeping Luke otherwise occupied as I work on a red-meat post. I told him this morning that I needed to work, albeit at home, so he can have shoes and food and Star War toys, so he would have to spend good portions of the day amusing himself. If he indulged his usual habit of just demanding that I play with him, I'd reluctantly have to dress him and take him to Snow Day School, where he would have to do math, clean tables, watch a long movie about the history of the button and have a big, huge, giant bowl of green beans for lunch. . .
So far, he's been pretty good.
Okay - tonight, I'm supposed to be attending this Billie Jean King Cup exo at Madison Square Garden - featuring Venus and Serena Williams and Jelena Jankovic and Ana Ivanovic in short-form scoring showdown (check the site for details). I was going to attend the 11 am pre-event presser, but I can't imagine that's going to happen now, and I wonder if the main event itself is going to come off as planned. If it does, I'll be going, and will write about it tomorrow. It's funny, I haven't had much chance to focus on this event in the last few days, but any time tennis comes to Madison Square Garden it's a great thing.
Talk amongst yourselves, I'll be checking in, off-and-on, all day.