Magic Board

Me as Snurfer Boy. Look at that Hill, Yo! 

Tuesday morning, school was cancelled due to a strategic snow storm that hit precisely at the worst time.  Or best, depending on your perspective. 

Since I have been in too many harrowing journeys and accidents and near-misses back and forth to my school in the 26.5 years I have worked there, I am fine with the "safe rather than sorry" approach. I see snow and snow days as Sabbaths from the Sky of sorts. Chill out and enjoy. Slow down, watch the flakes fall.

I like the Winter and love the snow. Tuesday morning, after it was called, I knew what I was to do. Hit the legendary Snurfer, which was a prehistoric dinosaur-like ancestor of snowboards. Snurfers are still made but their heyday was the 1970's.  Snurfers were a big part of my childhood and adolescence.  I still recall me and the boys going down to Valley Forge Park and Snurfing for hours at our special location when we were Teens. I found a sweet and steep hill here in the neighborhood last Winter which is just two blocks away. So, the stage was set. A good hill is imperative. 

I also found a good use for my organic free trade Coconut Oil which is pretty useless for cooking in an iron skillet. To grease down the Snurfer!     

As an aside, my part of Pennsylvania is not a big snow precipitation area. I was going to buy snowshoes when I was up in Buffalo Thanksgiving Weekend this year until I remembered that I needed snow to use them. Mudshoes would be better here.   

Here in South-Central Pennsylvania, we may get three or four snows a Winter. A lot of Flurries, an occasional  Blizzard. The temperatures go below and above freezing pretty routinely, which is ideal for road pothole formation but poor for Winter sports.  We are not going to host the Winter Olympics in other words. 

Before Color TV and UHF antennas and later Cable came to my old neighborhood, which turned the kids into zombies, we kids in the neighborhood played football, basketball, street hockey, manhunt (using an escaped convict motif), climbed trees, rode bikes, skateboarded, and usually were always outside doing something fun. Winter in particular was a blast. We lived in a hilly series of roads that went from high elevation to low elevation over a run of about a 1/3 mile or so. When it snowed and the streets became sheets of snow/ice, we would start at the top on our sleds and race down to the end of the roads, attempting to upend our fellow sledders by grabbing the sleds' rudders and flipping the sled. 

It was all very Darwinian.  And about the most fun imaginable. I had an old sturdy Sears Sled. Not as fast and nimble as the Flexible Flyers of my peers, but pretty indestructible. 

I recall an adult in the neighborhood, a Black guy who had a Ph.D. in Economics (very well known in some circles even today) joining in on the fun and mayhem. He had grown up in North Philly and probably missed such Suburban shenanigans as a youth. When the Snurfers came out, we were in full snow season. So, when years later I saw an old school Snurfer for sale at a Garage Sale, I snapped it up like a shark does to a seal. 

Like Rosebud in Citizen Kane, the Snurfer is emblematic of simpler and more fun time of life, before seriousness set in like a deep freeze, making me hard, jaded, and unemotional. I became old too young and have been slowly trying to thaw out the cold parts of my personality over the years. I lost part of my later childhood but have found it again slowly. The trick is to let those pieces come back alive and thaw but still retain the necessary seriousness and soberness that adulting requires. 

Being a 54 year old goofball adolescent wanna-be is pretty sad. People get themselves in all kinds of problems wanting to be young when old, to reconcile old hurts by pretending to be a Teen. Tricky to let those inner rings come alive again without reverting to immaturity and recklessness. So, when I hit the hill on Tuesday for about ten times, I was breaking through the ice of disappointment and depression. All of those cold winters of despair where it became always cold but never snow (Tip of Hat to C.S. Lewis's "Always Winter, Never Christmas" in the Narnia stories.)

I hope to keep the more youthful aspects of my personality alive as I age. So I don't further create Rosebud-like regrets and resentments.  Fun is the elixir of life. As I have said before, "Life is far too serious to be taken seriously." 

Rosebud, From Citizen Kane