Crosstown Snowball Fight

It was late one Saturday night in the winter of 1973 when two of my fellow fourteen year old comrades and I exited the Roxy Movie Theater in Downtown Tacoma. During the movie the city had been blanketed with several inches of heavy wet snow. As the other theater goers headed for their cars we trudged to the bus stop and waited for our ride as the last of the downtown traffic cleared out of the area. We stood there looking down the road as the dark tire tracks turned to white, and then through the swirling flakes came the big green city bus that would take us home. Slipping around corners and down hills the driver struggled to get us out of the empty business district, and after a few detours finally got us into the more residential north end of town. Suddenly the city was alive with kids out in the snow, and more suddenly WHAPP! A snowball slammed into the windshield of the bus, and after a few expletives from the driver more started hitting the sides. My friends and I opened a side window and several snowballs flew inside the bus. We pressed together what snow we could retrieve and returned fire. Then we opened more windows to collect more incoming ammunition. Instead of yelling at us to knock it off as you might expect, the driver encouraged us defend the bus. With most of the windows now open we were pulling snow in from the roof of the bus, and snowballs were flying into, and out of the bus. After clearing the gauntlet we continued to fire snowballs at unsuspecting victims along the way until at one turn the bus slid sideways, jumped the curb, and crashed into a metal but stop sign. The driver maneuvered the bus back onto the road as we closed up all the window, thus ending our night assault on the city. That was probably my last true Norman Rockwell winter. I hope we weren’t the ones who ruined it for everyone, but kids just can’t have fun like that anymore.

(With a little editing and re-writing I might be able to make this post into a decent little story, but that’s part of the charm of a “daily” blog. Editing is fast and minimal. Besides I’m on vacation right now. In fact if it wasn’t raining this story probably would have ended before the movie got out.)