Reminiscing recently about childhood snow days home from school and the good times we neighborhood kids had sledding down the hill was, in itself, great fun for me! Then, the recent unseasonably cold air and copious amounts of snowfall this year inspired my mind to compare those days to these.
My family moved to the home in which I again reside in the summer of 1967 and all the kids in the neighborhood would sled down the biggest hills, including ours on Ramona Drive East in Paducah for hours on end. I probably was involved right up until the biggest snows (blizzards by our western Kentucky reckoning) in the late ’70s.
So, here we are – as many as 50 years later – and I couldn’t even find a sled in the garage! Who knows what happened to the two I remember over the years, but I couldn’t find either one! Some relative or another might have “borrowed” them or maybe somebody bought one or both at a yard sale. I don’t know. … It was just as well because not a single kid from those days was out there on the slopes, either!
Chris Carfield still lives down the street in the house where he grew up, but he’s a long-haul trucker now and probably out of town… I realize most of the families had moved away, replaced mostly by newer neighbors whom I don’t really know. (After all, it’s the new American Way!) I’ve heard that at least a couple of those “kids” now are retired and a couple more have had knee replacement surgery… So, I had to accept that without a sled and without my old pals, I might have to just sit on the porch and watch the sledding…
… No luck there, either… Among the few houses that do have school-age children, most apparently were inside (like most other days), playing video games on their I-phones or cyber-shopping for the latest drones they want for this spring.
So, I turned my attention to shoveling the driveway. That immediately reminded me that my grandfather died after suffering a heart attack from shoveling his driveway back in the day… (…Talk about your “teachable moments!”) and since I’ve never been a big fan of shoveling the driveway anyway (Isn’t that what the spring thaw is all about?), I quickly removed that possibility from my list. …Whew, close call!
Well then, how about some snowcream? I wondered! … Well, the milk in the refrigerator had expired and the antique bottle of vanilla I found in the cupboard was empty... wonder how many years it does take to evaporate completely? … plus dogs had left their various “marks” in the yard, so no usable snow there…
That’s when I remembered the other part of our snow days as kids – watching TV!
So, in the spirit of the ’70s, I located “Gunsmoke” on cable… a two-parter, in fact, featuring Ken Curtis as Festus Hagen and another great character actor, Strother Martin, as an old gold prospector in the desert. I kept thinking how my friend and co-worker Denny Foy would have fit right in the picture with those two and probably would’ve upstaged them! Well, anyway, the burning sun, the Martin character’s pet rattlesnake, and the circling buzzards took my mind off the winter cold and transported me back to a simpler time… Mission Accomplished… and without any threat of frostbite! … Wonder what time they show those reruns of “Match Game?” …