Remember when we only knew if school was cancelled by tuning into the local television or radio stations? The list would stream across the bottom of the screen in alphabetical order in an excruciatingly slow loop. If yours wasn’t listed on the evening news, it might appear on the ten o’clock news, or we tuned in before school. Oh, the suspense! In retrospect, this was all incredibly inconvenient but terribly exciting, and to this generation, it all sounds like a mythical Norman Rockwell scene on a magazine cover.
Sometimes, we did not know school was cancelled until the bus simply failed to show up. On one such occasion, I remember a group of us dutifully waiting on the corner in a snowstorm for a such a bus that never arrived. While we waited, someone playfully tossed a loosely packed snowball, then another. Within seconds, a friendly melee erupted as we pelted each other with handfuls of soft powdery snow. Kids nowadays cannot imagine standing on a corner in a snowstorm, wondering if their bus will arrive or if school would even open, but that bus never did arrive, and we did not make it home until dark.
Our joy quickly spread through the neighborhood, and we never wondered once about school. We disappeared into clouds of powdery snow, and as the temperatures quickly rose and the snow grew stickier, we headed for the park to make snowmen. What naïve and inexperienced elementary kids we were! Just as the sun peeked through the clouds, I remember a distinct Thwap! Then another and another.
The middle-schoolers ambushed us. Older and wiser, they reserved their energy early in the morning, patiently waiting for the consistency of the snow to change from corn starch to sticky cotton candy. And while we dreamed of silly snowmen, they forged an armory of snowballs. Barely inside the park gates, panic ensued as my friends fell to the left and right. Our attackers moved like a trained militia, aiming snowballs at our stinging faces. When we fell, they pelted us mercilessly while a soldier gleefully pulled out our collars or waistbands, filling them with icy snow.
For a short time, all joy of a snow day vanished as the middle-schoolers unleashed wintery carnage on us, but high-schoolers soon emerged, seizing their stockpiles of snowballs and raining fire and ice on that poor group of tweens. As we sniffled and snotted, we watched snowball justice on a Medieval scale, and our former foes soon lay buried under mounds of snowballs in the city park. The high-schoolers disappeared as quickly as they arrived, and it was all over.
The joyful spirit of a snow day returned, however, and those same middle schoolers helped us with our snowmen, and we promised not to tell our parents. Before long, we lost ourselves in snow angels and forts and sliding down hills with cardboard we pulled from dumpsters. Not an adult in sight, and we never went home. Our parents never wondered where we were or worried. They knew we would come home when we got hungry or when the streetlights came on, whichever came first.
Modern children still know the joy of a snow day, but in our overconnected, overprotected, and overscheduled world, few of them will ever experience an epic snow day. The stinging of fingers and toes near the fire. The pure happiness of a carefree, adult-free day with no certainty and no worry. Children wandering and battling faux wars that led to truces marked with snow angels and cardboard sleds.
Like old Saturday Evening Post magazine covers, it’s all a myth to modern families. Nevertheless, maybe some things we have lost are worth rediscovering, like the suspense and joy of a surprise snow day. Unfortunately, our childhoods are now the Norman Rockwell images for this generation, but maybe some parts should once again be real, for I can think of nothing this generation needs more than a truly epic snow day.
Tom Deighan is superintendent of Duncan Public Schools. You may email him at deighantom@gmail.com and read past articles at www.mostlyeducational.com
