Snow day digs up fond memories
My childhood best friend would join me in making quick work of our own sidewalks, so we could then be free to find people willing to give us a few bucks for shoveling.
This past Sunday, with 8 inches of snow having fallen in Boston over the weekend, Matt O’Malley took to Twitter. The Boston city councilor offered a $5 gift certificate to the J.P. Licks ice cream shop to any kids who shoveled out fire hydrants.
O’Malley required before-and-after photos as proof. I asked him if it worked.
“About 10 kids (including two sets of siblings) have taken me up on the Boston Hydrant Challenge so far,” O’Malley said on Sunday evening. “I am hopeful we will hear from more tomorrow … It serves a public safety purpose, builds better citizens, and ends with ice cream. What could be better than that?”
I agree (and just in case any permanently malcontented political types with an ax to grind are wondering, no public funds are being used; O’Malley is footing the bill on his own dime). If I were 50 years younger and still living in the Dorchester neighborhood I grew up in, I would have been on his offer quicker than the Cookie Monster on a sack full of Oreos.
Back in my day — which, as time passes, seems more and more like when dinosaurs roamed the earth and maybe I’m one of them — two thoughts were immediate when I awoke to find there had been a snowfall: • Is school canceled? • If so, where’s our shovel? I can make some money!
My childhood best friend, Stephen Murphy, was always of a similar frame of mind, so he would join me in making quick work of our own sidewalks, so we could then be free to go knocking on the doors of our neighbors. And we always found people willing to give us a few bucks to perform a task they dreaded — leaving them free to stay warm and enjoy the sight of us feverishly shoveling so we could move on to the next house before some other kids got to it.
Now, though, I can remember only one time in the past 20 years when a kid knocked on our door and asked if we’d like our walk shoveled. And I was glad to have the question asked, too, since I’m as lazy now as I was industrious then.
It may just be that we live in the wrong neighborhood — there are surprisingly fewer children on our Watertown street than there were in Dorchester in the 1960s — or maybe the kids who are willing to go door-to-door look at our long driveway (the longest on the block, unfortunately) and say to themselves, “Let’s try another house first!”
Whatever the reason, we generally rely upon the kindness of our excellent upstairs neighbors — at least 30 years younger than we are — to do the job. God bless their youth. I try to do right by them. I’ll be buying them a nice bottle of wine for last weekend’s effort.
Still, I feel guilty about making our neighbors sweat — so if any kids are reading this and want to make a quick buck, come knock on my door the next time there’s a significant snowfall. I can’t legally give you the bottle of wine, but I’ll make it otherwise worth your while.