I wasn’t able (yet) to build my snowman, but I thought I’d share this photo. This is my sister Ann (on left with the blue hat and blue & red scarf) and me (on the right) with our snowman, circa 1974. We grew up in a house about two blocks from the Long Island Rail Road and the Patterson Fuel Oil Company. Before it was Patterson Fuel it was Patterson Coal & Ice. Their old coal depot was long gone and paved over into a parking lot for the oil delivery trucks, but if you were a kid, nice and close to the ground because you were short and really sharp-eyed you could walk along the grass outside the chain link fence surrounding the lot and find little pieces of coal. If you were really, really brave, you’d sneak behind the poplar trees to where the cement barrier and chain link fence barred the way to the Long Island Rail Road tracks. If you walked really close to the barrier or (and of course, I never did this…) slid under the hole dug near the fence by the local hoodlum teens, you could walk next to the tracks and find lumps of coal from the days when the LIRR trains rain on coal-fired engines. There was still coal there in the early 1970’s. The coal on this snow man was real. One year, we did indeed leave coal in Ann’s Christmas stocking. Or was it mine, or Steve’s? I can’t remember now. But I do remember hunting for coal near the old Patterson company.
I remember my dad bundling us all into the car after a big snow storm and driving into Queens, to Alley Pond Park. There were hills there and we’d take our old clunky wooden sleds out. He would sometimes forget to wax the metal runners, and we’d leave rusty trails along the snow.
There was one big adult-sized sled and a child’s sled. The child’s sled could really get some speed going…it just zoomed down those hills. The child’s sled had been my dad’s and it was from the 1930’s. My older sister rescued the sled when we sold my dad’s house, repainted it, and hung it on the wall of her office as a decoration. Every time I see it in her office, amidst her academic diplomas and other important things, it makes me smile and feel all warm inside.
My dad loved to sled. He told us stories of growing up in the Bronx in the 1920’s. He and my Uncle John would skitch. Skitching means that the kids would take their sleds along the snowy New York City streets and grab hold of the end of the street car, letting the old street cars pull them along their sleds. That’s called skitching a ride in New York parlance. When I was a kid, sometimes the bold (and probably stupid) teens would try to grab the bumpers of cars and do that. My mother would yell at my dad not to tell us such stories. It was kind of a relief to know that my dad did bad and stupid things too as a kid, to tell you the truth.
My dad had a scar on his left bicep from a sledding accident. My Uncle John (his best friend who we grew up calling uncle) and he were sledding down a hillside near the Grand Concourse in the Bronx (this would be around 1930 or so) and his sled went out of control. It shot down a hill and he flew off, and his arm went over a spike on top of a fence. The spike went through the flap of skin on his arm. He pulled his arm off, grabbed the sled, and ran home crying. My grandma bandaged it up then yelled at him until she was blue in the face. He still loved sledding even as an adult and he gave us that love of sledding, too. But I bet he avoided that hill after that.
I’ll leave you with one short Christmas memory from my childhood, probably a year or two after the photo above was taken. One year, we waited way too long to get a Christmas tree. We always bought a live Christmas tree. It was probably a day or two before Christmas, and the tree lots were just picked bare. There were Charlie Brown trees that looked as if one ornament would crash them over and the gigantic, big bucks trees, but the normal firs that were within an average family’s price range were all gone….except for a few trees. My dad grabbed one, we tied it to the roof of the car, and off we went.
Well on Sunday when we went to put it up, we were in for a shock. While it looked full from the front, the entire backside of the tree was bare. Trees can have spots without branches, but this was like a huge bald spot on a guy with hair down to his waist. Bare spot? Let’s just say that even turned to the wall, you knew this tree had issues. Big issues.
We turned that tree this way and that, we fussed and tried to hide it with tinsel, but to no avail. Suddenly my dad disappeared. We heard him in the basement rummaging around. He left his hand drill in the living room. The next thing I knew, he returned with branches from the hemlock hedge next to the garage.
Carefully, he drilled holes in the trunk of the tree and stuffed them with hemlock branches. If you didn’t look too close, you couldn’t tell the difference. And by hanging on the lightest ornaments and tinsel, we got away with our jerry-rigged tree.
