Winter Tale

Forest Hills, where I grew up, was famous for its tennis stadium but not for its forest or its hills. The closest we got to a hill was a natural rise and dip in the terrain something like a lump in mashed potatoes. We called it the Toilet Bowl, roughly the size and shape of a football field with a rise on three sides emptying into a flat valley and an end zone that led straight into the Grand Central Parkway. 

January would have prompted my mother to urge three sweaters under a hooded mackinaw on me knowing as she did that cold wind led to chills which meant the grippe at best, or pneumonia at worst or God-forbid-twice-as-bad, the dreaded double pneumonia. Mom was a pioneer in the classification of air. She could differentiate between the ill-wind of microbe-carrying drafts and fresh air which had healing properties.

So it was that I trudged off with my Flexible Flier to meet two friends at the Toilet Bowl. They were similarly weighted down. I suggested we take the slope on my sled in our version of a triple-decker sandwich. I was on the bottom with Frankie in the middle and Stanley on top. 

Frankie was already obese at age twelve as I can testify to. Steering was like navigating through a vat of Russian dressing slobbered on what was my slice of rye bread. The flier wasn't flexible enough I misguided us smack into a bush …or was it the bush that came at us traveling around twenty miles an hour. I recall looking up at Stanley as he orbited overhead. Frankie never got air-borne but did get a souvenir splinter in his forehead. I came away with a mere bloody nose. Stanley nosed-dived into a cushion of snow. 

None of us ended up on the Grand Central Parkway or if we did the past seven decades have been an after-life. Had I been run over by a truck I expect my three sweaters might have saved me but my mother would have killed me anyway. 

After that I only went down into the Toilet Bowl on solo trips or metaphorically on some downhill days.