Relay: A Snow Job

When I was a kid — and how many people hate hearing that from their parents? — I didn’t walk 12 miles to school in a snowstorm, I didn’t wake at 5 a.m. to deliver newspapers, and I certainly didn’t eat tuna casserole because the children in China were starving.

But growing up on City Island in the Bronx, there was nothing more exciting than waking up to a quiet, still morning and sensing that snow had fallen through the night and school would probably be closed that day.

The quiet that settled upon the outdoors was a welcome reprieve from the usual sounds of shouting garbage truck drivers making their morning rounds or neighbors’ cars heating up in driveways. Yes, everything was still for that short, special moment when the day dawned and snow had blanketed the earth.

We would run to the windows and see how much had fallen on a day when my mother usually couldn’t even get us out of bed to ready for school.

The subways weren’t closed, the roads weren’t shut down, and rarely did we panic-shop for bread, batteries, and milk. In my house we would have felt lucky to run out of milk, since it was force-fed to us by the nuns in our Catholic school and we hated it, especially because it was always served warm in those little waxed containers.

Meteorologists, which my husband, the fisherman, pretends to be, have taken the fun out of a surprise snowstorm. C’mon! “Juno, the storm of the century?” Half-hour weather specials pre-empting regular television programming? Snowmageddon? A little much, no?

And since the supposed storm of the century didn’t materialize, politicians are turning it into a political battle, blaming each other for the mistake they made by basically shutting down New York City.

I remember those surprise snow days with such fondness. Before bundling up with layer upon layer of clothing, three pairs of gloves, two pairs of socks, and our heavy winter coats, we would be fed a hearty breakfast, since my mother knew once we went to our snow hill, we wouldn’t be seen again until darkness had settled in or our fingers became numb with frostbite. Kids these days are wimps when it comes to a good snow day. An hour outdoors and they’re freezing their little bums off and crying to go inside, back into the warmth of their homes to play video games.

We always had dogs flying around us, running up and down the hill trying to avoid being hit with a sleigh. On one particularly long day of sledding my friend’s collie, who looked like Lassie but was named Tara from “Gone With the Wind,” disappeared for a while. After we had dinner and she still hadn’t shown up for her own meal, my friend and I went looking for her. We stopped a fuel oil delivery man and asked if he had seen a collie, and being the compassionate man that he was, he said, “That dog’s dead; it was hit by a car up on the avenue.”

Our tears froze when we found her lifeless body. The incident kind of took all the joy out of sledding for us after that.

I only tell this story so people know to keep their dogs in when the plows are around. They drive so fast, and I realize they have to for a strong running start, but any animal that crosses their paths is in jeopardy.

The latest snowfall will probably stick around for a while, and everyone’s favorite sleighing spot will be busy this weekend. So bundle up, my friends. Tether your dogs and let’s be careful out there.

Janis Hewitt is a reporter for The Star.