Snow Falls On Pigs

by Jack Cashill

After Christmas dinner, at home here in Kansas City, I lead my own little coalition of the willing on a post-prandial nature hike through the neighborhood.

Four Christmases ago, on a single digit day in an unusually frigid winter, my coalition had shrunk to two, myself and a friend’s nine year-old daughter. Well bundled, the two of us set out. When we reached Loose Park, I saw something that I had not seen before in Kansas City, certainly not this early in the season.

The pond had so thoroughly frozen that kids were able to play hockey on it. They had cleared the snow, set up a single net, and were flailing away. "Wow," said my little friend, "that’s cool." She was impressed.

I was not. I had fallen prematurely into the selective memory trap of the would-be geezer. "When I was a kid," I said, "the lakes were always frozen in the winter. That’s where we did all our ice skating." Although I had grown up in an area slightly warmer than this, I was sure my winters were colder than those of today and, of course, much snowier too.

I still think of that snow, and in my Joycean reveries I visualize it at night. I watch the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the sole streetlight in an alley that ran behind the rotting fences and ramshackle garages of my long and sloping block. Even as a kid, I knew I was blessed to have such an alley. We called it "Pigs," short for Pig Tails Alley, its historic name. It was uniquely ours.

On snowy nights—and it always snowed back then—my little pre-teen homies and I would retreat to Pigs with our sleds and thermoses and do the kind of death-defying sledding that would have horrified parents or even passers-by. But that was the beauty of Pigs. It was unseen by adult eyes. Anything could happen there because no adult knew what did happen. It was our own private Cambodia.

In my mind’s eye I watch the snow falling on every part of Pigs and on all those who lived it with me, falling softly upon me and my brother Bob, or broken-home Bobby who lived a few doors down, or Bobby down the street and his retarded older brother George, on Earl the colored kid and my fellow Dodger fan, on big Roger and his whiny little brother Norman, on Donato the Italian immigrant kid, on pretty boy Paul, on the Irish immigrant kids Sean and his weird little brother with the unpronounceable name, and on Richie, our leader, and even on Ronnie, his psychopathic little bully of a brother.

This was a neighborhood rich in nothing but kids. Our gang was but one of four on the block. It had no name save for its locale, Pigs, the middle of which we ruled. This was the alley’s prime real estate, the stretch where Pigs sloped steep enough to sled. Only rarely did outsiders even think of sledding here.

Once, feisty Artie and his absurd little Orange Street gang dared to try. We quickly dispersed these ragamuffins, captured Artie, tied him to a fence post for at least an afternoon, and finally rewarded his defiance by making him one of us. Since it meant sledding in Pigs, he was pleased to join.

The gang from "the apartments" at the south corner tried every now and then as well. They had their own psychopath for a leader, a kid named Bruce. Bruce owned that ultimate of childhood credentials—he had actually poked a kid’s eye out with a stick. We knew this to be true because "glass-eyed Teddy" remained in the gang. Where else could this one-eyed loser go? We didn’t want him, even if he could pop his artificial eye out on request and appall even psychopathic Ronnie.

Bruce sometimes chose to settle things with rock fights, a phenomenon that I and all the other sane kids dreaded. But for Ronnie and Bruce, bring it on. Bruce already had one eye notched on his belt. He was looking for number two. Ronnie was looking for his first. The rest of us were mostly just looking for cover, a feat complicated by the fact that we couldn’t appear to be.

 

Jack Cashill is Ingram's Executive Editor and has affiliated with the magazine for 25 years. He can be reached at jackcashill@yahoo.com. The views expressed in this column are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram's Magazine.