by Daniel Picker
Save for this one occasion where Mrs. MacBoyne waved from her car to offer us a ride to school, my younger brother and I always walked to school in every sort of weather: winter blizzard, spring thunderstorm, fall chill, or early summer heat, humidity, or storm.
I stood next to my mom just inside the storm door; the lowest square pane afforded me a clear view out to the still dark early morning. Mrs. MacBoyne’s large rounded sedan had backed all the way up her long drive and now straddled the sidewalk. My little brother stood on the opposite side of our mom. We could see large white flakes slowly falling and see the clouds of grey exhaust rising below the rear trunk of Mrs. MacBoyne’s car between the red and white taillights.
Mrs. MacBoyne rolled down her window and waved her white – gloved left hand toward Mom.
“I think she’s offering you boys a ride to school.”
Mom stepped in front of me and out on our front porch.
“What is it Elaine?”
“Do the boys need a lift to school?” she asked.
“Oh, yes; that’s so generous of you.”
Mom looked down at us and asked, “Do you both have your lunches?”
“Yes Mom,” we both uttered almost in unison.
“Well go ahead; she’s waiting for you; you two can both sit on the big backseat.”
I walked out the front door before my mom could hug me a second time, and I sensed her checking my brother’s jacket to make sure it was zipped up properly; he wore a thick orange knit hat that was pulled down to his blonde eyebrows.
She said both to herself and to us, “I wonder if the Abbotts milkman will deliver in this blizzard?”
I looked back and saw my little brother standing there beside Mom as the snow fell around them; she was in her furry bedroom slippers and bathrobe.
“Let’s go little bro, come on.”
As we walked down the front steps, we saw the small white and red Abbotts Milk truck slide around the corner at the top of our hill, its red curving fenders still distinctly curving over each front wheel through the falling flakes.
Little brother walked down our two, uneven steps; the flagstones on the porch were half covered, those at the front of the porch, not sheltered by the roof below, and the front walk already showed a white coating an inch deep. We walked to the left down our sidewalk, and Mrs. MacBoyne, with her window down, said, “Get in boys.”
I walked around the back of the huge dark, rounded sedan and read on the back of the trunk DeSoto, then pulled open the big back door as my little brother pulled open the door on the closer side. The light was dim inside; we both pulled shut the heavy doors at the same time, and they made a secure thud. Two vinyl, elongated straps dangled across the back of the front seats, each about three feet long, draped in a wide dark smile. Mrs. MacBoyne’s brown pillbox hat bobbed above the front driver’s seat.
“OK, boys, off we go; the snow isn’t too deep yet.”
She backed down the last part of the driveway and backed out toward the left, then slowly straightened her wheels and drove up our gently curving slope. The sky exuded grey light and was now filled with large, abundant flakes dancing down the sky.
The seats were soft and wide. It felt warm in the back. I could hardly see out the side window, which began at, about my chin height. Only the center and top of the front windshield gave us a view, but the low roof obscured that. The front side windows let us see the snow falling past the green street light poles as she drove down the avenue the six blocks toward our school. When we reached the corner where the crossing guard stood, she pulled into a square parking lot where dad used to park his Scout when he needed to tune it up.
“Thanks,” I said as I swung the heavy door open and shut.
Fred pushed his open, and then closed it on the other side.
“Bye boys!” Mrs. MacBoyne enthused; “have a good day!”
As I stood next to the crossing guard, I asked my little brother, “Do you think we might have a half day snow day?”
“Maybe; I hope so.”
“Me too.”
Late in the morning, with the sky now milky white, the snow continued to fall. The black macadam behind the school and below our classroom windows two stories up seemed a sea of grey-ish white; the dull metal bike racks and the few bicycles in them stood lined and heaped with a few inches of snow now. Lunch waited two hours ahead, but big Leif pulled up the bottom of the old, shellacked, twelve-paned window and looked out. I stood near him with a classmate.
“It’s really sticking,” Leif said.
“It’s piling up!”
Mrs. Worthington called from the front of the room, “Boys, close that window and take your seats.” As she said that, Bridget strolled by Leif and smiled. Her light brown hair shone below the halo of ceiling lamps.
“You boys are going to get in trouble.”
“Hi, Bridget,” Leif said smiling.
We stood beside him gawking at her beauty in her plaid wool skirt, and dumbfounded by Leif’s brave remark.
“Not I!” joked Leif.
Sure enough, when we were about to be excused for Lunch an announcement came over the loudspeaker: “Due to the inclement weather classes will end at the start of the 12:30 lunch time. All afternoon sports events are cancelled.”
I loud roar and yells of glee filled our classroom and sounded outside in the hallway beyond our open classroom door.
“Snow day!” everyone shouted.
I went to the back of the room and pulled my coat from a hook. Leif, JP, and Clete were gathering their coats and lining up near the front door for the bell, which would set us free. I forgot about Fred because he usually walked home with his friends in his class, two years behind my class. I started to wonder about my afternoon paper route, which I usually began after school, but that usual time was three hours from now.
The bell sounded shrilly and we ran out the door and down the stairwell with its metal railings and pale green and tan vinyl tiles with the diamond – patterned treads. The big bank of windows before us at the front of the school shone bright and filled with the grey sky and cascading snow. As we stood out front of the school, just under the roof beside the colonnade of pillars at the front of the alcove, we saw a line of school buses from a neighboring town stopped and packed with the visiting boys’ basketball team.
Leif, JP, Clete, and I walked out front and lingered on the front walk as the snow fell. An old custodian was looking up at the flagpole, and scratching his head, trying to decide to take down the American flag early. We saw a group of boys already gathering into a pack down the wide walk to the right, away from the front office and the view of the teachers. We joined the others, smiling and jostling each other. By the time, we walked past the old Administration building Leif started scooping up snow from the fence and shaping a snowball. The dreaded Dauphin District buses stood stopped one behind the other behind a line of cars running down the street that stretched in front of the old brick school buildings. Our old kindergarten’s curving windows with white paper snowflakes taped in the panes blurred in the distance behind us.
Leif, JP, and Clete each had packed solid, white, baseball – size snowballs and hurled them at the yellow and black side panels of the school bus. The snowballs resounded loudly. A kid with dark hair gazed out the square window that was halfway down. He looked like a demented Indian with an ugly, narrow shrewish face. Clete hurled another snowball just below the window and it made a loud thud.
The bus driver opened his side door opposite which he sat, and looked at us, then yelled, “You boys are going to get in trouble!” Then he pulled a long silver arm lever and yanked the door shut.
The bus moved slowly past us as other boys hurled a barrage of snowballs, many of which fell short as the bus picked up speed as the traffic began to move along. Behind the last, bus a white Town & Country station wagon rolled by. We could see Bridget waving from the back, side window, the wind catching in her long hair since her window was halfway down. We stood with our open smiles.
As we walked, we turned left at the corner and trekked below the canopy of large trees. They reached all the way across the street from both sides and intertwined above the center, thus forming a tunnel of white, ornate branches lined with snow; the scene seemed like walking through one of the complicated paper snowflakes some of the girls cut out in school.
Leif looked over to me, and tilted his head to my left saying nearly silently, “Let’s go,” so we walked a bit further along the curb.
Few cars rolled down the avenue; the street covered in white snow several inches deep. Occasionally we could hear a car rolling behind us in the distance as we walked four across the sidewalk now with JP and Clete on the snow-covered grass beside the curbs and under the trunks of the oaks, buttonwoods, and tulip poplars. The cars that drove down the avenue moved slowly with a muffled sound. When one stopped at the stop sign near the crest of the hill, we snuck behind it and grabbed onto the back bumper skitching a ride behind the car with the snow flying between our shoes and sneakers as we crouched down on our haunches. If the driver stopped and yelled at us, we moved away from the car then gathered innocently by the curb and stop sign, waiting for him to start to drive off, and a few bold boys snowballed his car once he had driven off and was at a safe distance. The grey-ish sky now cloaked us.
A long white Cadillac Sedan de Ville slowly approached the corner where we stood, all four of us now at this point, Leif, JP, Clete, and I. Soon I recognized the car as Dr. Ludwicke’s, whose house sat in the middle of my paper route. I knew him from Friends Meeting, too. For no reason at all Clete began to pack a fat, icy snowball, as Dr. Ludwicke slowed before the stop sign; then as he began to slowly make the turn up Buttonwood Road, Clete unleashed a heavy snowball which hit the sedan’s passenger side back window, and then to our surprise, shattered it.
Then Leif called out, “Run!”
We took off running down Tulip Poplar hill; I hesitated a moment, but had no choice but to follow and run; with my heart pounding in my chest and breath heaving I ran beside them until they raced down the side street, Olden Road, then up the driveway beside Milton’s house, then they climbed over the split rail fence in the backyard into Leif’s snowy, flat backyard.
“What did you do that for?” I asked Clete.
I felt like he must have known I knew Dr. Ludwicke, from when we were all in Church School on Wednesday afternoons back in Fourth grade, when Leif left school to go to the Methodist Church and JP, Clete and Del Monte went to the Catholic Church, and I walked past there to attend the old Friends Meeting.
“I dunno,” Clete, laughed.
“His son’s a doophus,” Clete said. “Chadwick Ludwicke.”
Leif started to brag about his family heritage; Leif Erikson discovered North America before the Pilgrims in the Mayflower and before Christopher Columbus in the Santa Maria. My family’s been in the town for three centuries.”
“That’s why you have mold growing between your toes and behind your ears,” Clete said.
By the time I made my way back to my street a half hour had passed, and over an hour since school let out early, and thankfully, Dr. Ludwicke’s car was long gone from the neighborhood. I could see a short rectangular bundle of newspapers heaped with snow before the old paperboy’s house; those were the papers for me paper route.
As a boy, on this, my first paper route I delivered The Evening Bulletin, with its crisp, ornate script at the top; in the corner in a more modern font in all capital letters was “NEARLY EVERYONE READS THE BULLETIN.”
On afternoons across a neighborhood within bicycling distance of my house, past the large clapboard houses of my neighborhood and the nearby neighborhoods of the large homes of my hometown I rode my bike. Near the middle part of my route and over six blocks from my house one home I rode by stood stalwart, grand and square with a red tile roof in a Mediterranean style, and next door, another even grander one stood in a Tudor style behind tall hedges. In between those houses and our house stood tall, square, three – story clapboard houses and large, shingled “Queen Anne’s” mom called them. Our house was a less grand two – story old Colonial house blocks from those. As a boy, I knew my mother worried about the difficulty in paying the mortgage, and property taxes, but I never figured others did too.
As a fifth grader, working as a paperboy in my hometown, part of my job entailed collecting from my customers. I rode my green stingray bicycle with a silver-grey and white banana seat; that bike new just a few months before.
Downtown, past where we walked after school across the sidewalk, closer to the curb, stood two old fashioned, curved gas pumps, the only ones on the two – lane highway. Back closer stood Mr. Angler’s stacks of newspapers on a low metal stand: The Philadelphia Inquirer, a morning paper, and The Evening Bulletin, an afternoon paper. Sometimes in the warmer months of early fall when I rode my new bike by those stacks of papers I noticed silver change glimmering in the sunlight on top of the papers. It seemed like a lot of change left unattended, as Mr. Angler was busy working behind his shop or out by the curb pumping gas or talking with a grey-suited man.
Tempted to scoop up a handful of quarters, dimes, and nickels, and ride off, I did one warm afternoon, and as I rode off in the bright sun, I soon realized this handful of change was not my change and that it grew sweaty in my hand as I thought, I must return it. Then I had to figure out how to surreptitiously, return the palm-full of change. I circled back on my bike; then when I saw Mr. Angler safely out of sight within the back of his shop I rode quickly by, slowed and dumped the small handful of three quarters, two nickels, and two dimes on top of a stack of papers and sped off once more, my conscience relieved.
But now, months later, with it snowing in the afternoons I had to deliver The Evening Bulletin. With my paper route, usually at the end of the week, a Thursday or a Friday afternoon, I rode around the various streets and sidewalks to the houses on my route, rang the doorbells, and said, “Paperboy, collecting for The Bulletin.”
This, the first winter with my route, after folding papers and wrapping them in red rubber bands and stuffing them in my canvas newspaper bag, on this snowy afternoon I rode my bike up the walk of a stone and clapboard house. That cold, winter afternoon I parked my bicycle with the kickstand and I walked up the curving slate walk to the two grey slate steps to the white front storm door. I reached up and rang the bell and waited, stamping my frozen feet slightly from side to side on the wooly brown doormat and holding my mittened hands as my breath smoked from the cold air surrounding me. The grass on either side of the curving walk, covered over by a white icy snow from this first snow of winter. The winter sky above seemed the same pewter-grey hue it always seemed at late afternoon in the winter, and though there a freezing wind rose, the sky seemed so still.
After I rang the doorbell with my mittened hand, I heard muffled footsteps and then the door opened, and I saw a young homemaker through the glass of the white-framed storm door.
“Paperboy. Collecting,” I said, with the cheeriest voice I could muster.
“Hello, you must be awfully cold,” the young woman, said after opening the door a crack; “Do you want to come inside?” she asked.
“OK,” I said.
She led me back to her kitchen, which appeared modern. The white walls surrounded the stove in the center; dark square tiles rested on top, and there a white, ceramic-tiled open counter near the center of her immaculate kitchen stood.
The woman was pleasant; she seemed somewhat young with light brown hair. However, her hair seemed darker than Miss Worthington’s in school did, and she seemed just as young, ten years younger than my mother, who now worked as a librarian in the city. I did wonder, was this woman a mom? I did not see any little children around. However, she did seem to be practicing to be a mom I thought.
“Would you like some hot chocolate?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said.
As a paperboy, I had never been offered hot chocolate before.
I watched as she filled a silver teakettle with water from the kitchen faucet, and placed it on the stovetop, and then turned the knob on the stovetop after she placed the kettle on one black square that rested near the other three; but there was no blue flame. Soon we saw steam rising from the spout lid. Moments before she had pulled a small, rectangular cardboard box from the cupboard above, and then she tore a white paper pouch she had removed from a cardboard box labeled “Swiss Miss”; she emptied that pouch into a white cup she had pulled from an adjacent cabinet. Now she poured the steaming water from her gleaming kettle into that same cup.
Now she was stirring the mixture with a shiny silver spoon: my white cup of steaming Swiss Miss hot chocolate.
“Here you are,” she said as she handed me the steaming white cup of hot chocolate. “I hope you like it.”
I could feel the warmth of the white ceramic cup in my hands, and I took a gulp. Boy was that hot chocolate hot! Right away, I could feel my tongue scalded from the one gulp. I paused and tried to smile to hide a grimace, and held the cup of hot liquid in my hands. I did not at all wish to take another sip, and certainly not another gulp. Besides, I had never had hot chocolate made with hot water. I certainly could not say anything. My mother had taught me, never complain when offered something, even if it was something, you did not wish or like.
The young mom of this house seemed to fail to understand why I did not gulp her hot chocolate.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“It’s too hot,” I said.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said.
Then she seemed to arrive upon a thought.
“Let me cool it off,” she said.
It seemed to me I thought she wished to hasten my departure.
She then pulled a blue plastic ice cube tray from her new refrigerator – freezer, and proceeded to plunk an ice cube in my mug of hot chocolate. I had never seen anyone do this before and I had never thought it was possible!
“Try it now,” she suggested.
As I watched the ice cube dissolve almost instantly in the cup, I thought again to myself, an ice cube dropped in hot chocolate? She didn’t even stir it and it melted nearly instantly. My tongue was still throbbing from the first swallow five minutes before, but I dutifully took another sip, this time with extreme trepidation.
“How is it now?” she asked.
“Still too hot,” I said, quietly while beginning to gag, and not wishing to be a bother.
She then removed another cube from the tray, and plunked it in my mug. It also seemed to vanish nearly instantly, leaving a little swirl of light foam at the top of the chocolate – white sea of brown hot chocolate. It was like watching a small grey ship sink very fast.
“Try it now,” she suggested.
I felt obligated, and I didn’t wish to appear timid, and I wished to please her, after all, she had offered me hot chocolate, so I took another reasonably – sized gulp.
“How is it now?” she asked.
“It’s still really hot,” I said as I gasped quietly.
“I think I forgot to pay you. Wait here; I’ll get my purse,” she said.
She returned and asked, “How much do we owe?”
“Two dollars and fifty-cents,” I said.
She handed me a five dollar bill and said, “Merry Christmas”; then while walking me toward her front door she said, “Keep warm; bundle up; it’s cold out.” Then, she held the storm door open for me.
“It’s snowing!” she said. “Be careful riding your bike.”
“I will; I like the snow,” I said.
“Are you alright?” she asked. “Are you going to be ok riding home?”
“I think so,” but I couldn’t let on or say, I think I burned my tongue. I merely said, “I think I can ride home ok.”
“OK, Billy” she said. “Bye-bye.”
“It’s really snowing!” I said.
“It is indeed,” she said. “Be careful riding your bike,” she reiterated.
“Thanks,” I said. “I will.”
The winter sky filled with now fine flakes falling, each one a hands’ breadth from another, and the flakes appeared to be lightly descending from the sky.
I looked out over to her curving stone walk; to the red and grey flagstones coated with white, as the snow coated the sidewalk in front of her house closer to the curb and soft white snow continued to line and blanket the branches of the trees to lace. The snow-covered limbs formed a lattice of white climbing up through the snowflakes falling from the winter sky above.
The sidewalk and street now covered too by several inches of soft snow.
I had departed with my tongue still hurting, and after zipping up my jacket and pulling on my hat at her front door, I said, “Thanks again,” and then I stepped into the still, quiet white winter world filled with silent snow falling that only I witnessed.
I saw my gray canvas newspaper bag coated by soft cold snow and brushed it off with my mittened hand. Then brushed off my banana seat; then after kicking up the kick stand as I held one handlebar, I grabbed the opposite right – hand grip and swung my right leg over the seat, and set out pedaling to the next house and eventually back toward home. My rear tire slipped sideways a bit when I first pressed down on the pedal. Many houses still needed their papers before I would return.
It was still a week before Christmas, but this snow accumulated.
I had walked down from the pale blue clapboard and grey stone house, and now I pedaled down that lady’s driveway into the street, which was pure, unbroken white without a single tire track, and pedaled toward the road past these large homes. They loomed blind on either side. As I approached the road, I looked back over my shoulder and slowed to witness a long arcing line of dark grey, like a single calligraphic brushstroke left by my black back bike tires.
