Winter Sports Contd.

Depending where you place the yardstick, there’s 20”-30” of snow on the ground right now in beautiful Berwyn. Anyone who lives next to a Great Lake knows what “lake effect” means. The rest of you, count your blessings. Penny the satanic basset hound does not feel blessed. Robert Duvall’s Lt. Col. Kilgore in “Apocalypse Now” said how he loved the smell of napalm in the morning. I wonder what he’d say about snow so dry you can literally breathe it in (especially when standing behind a snowblower). Oh, and napalm? It’s so cold right now the gel would turn to goo before freezing. Ooh, frozen fire. I should send that one along to Paul Bunyan. Come to think of it, I should hire Paul and that blue ox of his to plow the alley so I can get out and pick up my order of paczki at the Oak Park Bakery. I got to thinking—which is a lot better than feeling the cold creep into my fingers—behind said snowblower about some of the stuff we used to do as kids. One snowstorm when I was five or six, my dad took me out on the street in a sled. God, that was fun, until a car on St. Louis couldn’t stop until it had rolled over the lower half of my body. Lucky for me it was a 1954 Chevrolet (you tend to remember this sort of stuff) with clearance high enough that I fit underneath, if a little snug. We never went sledding after that. On the playground at school, we played this really dumb game, Lemon, I think we called it. Basically, you went up to someone, tackled him, and shouted, “One, two, three—Lemon!” or words to that effect. Like I said, dumb. There were also snowball fights. Given that ours was a neighborhood full of Baby-Boomer kids, there was no lack of participants. The fights were distinct from surprise attacks. Heaven help the third or fourth graders not paying attention on his way to or from school. Pow! in the side of the head. There were also “snow baths,” which were confined to the face, as I recall. You didn’t want to get one of those, either. Girls were probably more popular targets than boys, even; call it a form of adolescent flirting. Boys went after the most popular/attractive girls, not so much to hit them but to get them to ask not to be hit. Yes, it was a dark time for gender relations back then. Some girls, not so popular, would find themselves as walking targets. The tough ones dared their attacker to hit them, threatening all sorts of retribution if they did. There were plenty of tough girls at St. Gall. Now, back to the snowball fights. I remember one in particular, late January of fourth grade, all boys, about forty in total, half on one side of 54th Street, half on the other side. It literally rained snowballs for what seemed to be an hour but was probably closer to fifteen minutes, with some irate mother coming out on the front porch to break it up, lest her husband be greeted with a messy sidewalk on his return from work. But until that adult-imposed armistice, it was bombs away. Again, I can see the snowballs flying every which way; how the emergency room at Holy Cross wasn’t filled with boys blinded by a snowball to the eye is beyond me. The fighting paused only to allow cars and wooly mammoths to pass. Getting hit in the chest was best, except for the snow shrapnel exploding up into the base of your chin before sliding down your neck. Head shots were repeated and many. Really, good times.