I was in first grade. It started snowing in October and briefly stopped in mid-December. We had three unseasonably sunny days when the sun melted the top layer of snow that blanketed the city and left a two inch layer of ice above the mountains of snow that lined the sidewalks that led down the street to my school.
Christmas vacation was spent tunneling from yard to yard, block to block across snow-blocked streets until we reached a park that was almost a mile from my house. I was one of the younger kids, eager to prove that I had what it took to survive in my neighborhood--which was referred to as “the dead end” by long-time city residents. By the time school resumed, it had started snowing again.
During our vacation in the snow tunnel, one of the older kids who was home for Christmas on furlough from a maximum security juvenile detention center somewhere along the border between the State of Washington and British Columbia taught me how to leap out of our tunnel and snatch off the heads of high school girls these yarn beanies that they wore proudly, knit in their school colors and displaying the initials of their respective schools: LC, NC, CV, and so forth.
My mentor claimed that he lacked only one beanie to complete his set of all the high schools in Eastern Washington. He needed the beanie worn by the girls from the high school that was located in the only neighborhood in town that spawned more convicted juvenile felons than our own: JR.
By late January, it stopped snowing again. I left school at three o’clock and dove into one of our tunnels. Three blocks from home, I poked my head out to get my bearings---and there they were, two high school girls, and one of them was wearing a JR beanie.
(TO BE CONTINUED)
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