...a streak of white...a spray...ice crystal blossom on the road...snowball.

What follows is a cascade of images...young boys after school, you are one of them. You feel the snowball clenched in a too wet glove or sticking to a too furry mitten. Both hands are sopped and freezing so you alternate, jamming the coldest one into a pocket for warmth. Nerves on edge and jittery from the wait. The target is almost always a car. Sometimes you can tell it's a good target and don't worry about them stopping, with others you take your chances and run like hell. Most of the time everyone misses, the excitement and cold fingers make for lousy aim. But when it hits you can feel the impact resonate through shoulder and chest like a good golf swing or homerun.

It's not really people and cars that you throw at but something abstract and complicated, having more to do with your friends and life and school than strangers in cars. It just happens that it turns back into a cars and people the second after impact as you fumble through bushes, high dive it over fences, and try to disappear behind buildings and trees. If you really blow it, toss at a car of teenagers, then everyone spends the next eternity running and hiding and swearing at each other. Someone is going to get caught, you just don't want to be the poor sap that it happens to. You run, you hide, you run some more, and you listen and listen and hope. Lungs ache, legs are taffy, the cold hands are forgotten as you peel off your cap and lower the jacket zipper a bit to cool down.

For all of that excitement isn't it strange to be sitting in a car, decades in the future, a splash of snowball twenty feet away, and still haven't had a car dinged by a snowball? Not that I'm complaining, but it seems like I'm missing out here. How would I react? Shake my head in knowing consternation or jam on the brakes and go running after the kids? It seems that I owe them that much...

info