Snow Days
The official definition of a "snow day" is the closing of a school because of extreme weather. Snow day is a made up word. It didn't exist when we were kids. In fact, it wasn't even listed in all the dictionaries that I looked at.
Chicago kids didn't miss school because of the weather. A Papal visit, sure, but not because Jack Frost came to town. If it was cold outside, we put on more layers. If there was snow, we wore plastic bags in our shoes to help keep our feet dry. And we went to school.
This was quite an ordeal on some mornings, especially if you were the first one to blaze a path through the snow covered sidewalks. The plastic bags on your feet never stopped that deep snow, and you spent the rest of the day with cold ankles and wet socks.
Getting a ride to school was not much better than walking. The car didn't heat up till after you got to school, so you spent the entire ride battling a fierce breeze that hit you squarely on the knees before traveling up your uniform skirt to create the original polar vortex,
Since school wasn't closed, our moms didn't have a problem sending us outside to work in bad weather. Snow was an opportunity for the ambitious and warm to make some money. There were always sidewalks to shovel, cars to clear, and porches to sweep, but the real money was made by saving parking places. Snow was serious in Chicago, and it was a major sin to take a freshly cleaned parking space from a neighbor. Some people would place lawn furniture in the street to save their spots, while others hired kids to ward off interlopers. This sometimes resulted in a game of chicken between screaming drivers and kids standing their ground. Not a job for the faint of heart.
After working up some heat, we got to play. Everyone built forts and snowmen. And everyone had snowball fights. But only the kids with cool parents and insurance had ice rinks in their backyards. We had those cool parents, and we even had ice skates, probably from Uncle Wally.
Grandma Tolley had an Uncle Wally that liked to stop by on Saturday mornings after he had gone to the flea market. For some reason, he believed that he had to bring gifts everytime he came over. Uncle Wally was always good for a silver dollar on Christmas Eve, but his flea market finds were surrounded in mystery, the biggest mystery being why he thought we would need any of this stuff.. Sometimes it was a box of door handles, sometimes it was enough bowling balls for the whole family. That's why I think that the box of skates came from him, because sharp blades didn't sound like something my folks would buy. And besides, all the skates were used.
The really brave kids would participate in a winter sport called Skeeching. This entailed grabbing the bumper of a passing car at a stop sign and skating behind it on the icy streets. This was a dangerous sport for several reasons, one being that the skeecher risked sliding under the car when it came to a stop, and two, the skeecher risked being caught by the driver and turned over to his parents. Not for me. Too risky. On a side note, I once met a man from the north side of Chicago that claimed that this activity was called skitching. That is just wrong. As wrong as soda or catty corner.
At the end of the day (when the street lights came on), we all went home to take off our wet clothes and wait for our glasses to stop fogging. We also waited for the weatherman to tell us that school would be closed the next day, but that wasn't happening. It made more sense to wait for the pope to visit.
