Jason Rodriguez - The Moose in the Closet: Where’s the snow?

Today’s the first day I brought my winter jacket out of the closet and it was mainly for stylish reasons – I could have easily gotten away with a sweatshirt. Where’s the snow? The sub-zero weather? We’re digging into December now and I’m still biking around with a fleece on.

Didn’t it seem to get colder earlier when we were kids? I remember going sleighing in December with my pops. Prospect Park – we’d pack up a thermos of hot chocolate and bring the wooden sled as well as the red, round sleds; the ones that spun out of control all the way down the hill.

My dad would always bundle me up until I was sweating. We’d be with my cousin Luis and start with the smaller hill – the baby hill. Two of us would sleigh down the hill while the other watched over the hot chocolate thermos. We’d try to be goofy about it – sleighing down the hill on my dad’s shoulders or something similar. I remember that there was this creek that was quite a few tens-of-yards out from the bottom of the slope – it was nearly impossible to get enough momentum going to get close to that creek yet every time I went down that hill I was afraid I was going to fall in.

We’d always warm-up on the baby hill a bit, gearing up for the real reason we went to Prospect Park when it snowed – Suicide Hill.

Suicide Fucking Hill. I’d come running out of my bedroom the Saturday morning after it snowed BEGGING my dad to take me to Suicide Hill. That hill was monstrous as a kid – the fact that you had to walk up a staircase to get to the top of it was mind-boggling. There’d be a line of kids walking up that staircase, each of us taking a step at a time, watching kids fly down that hill packed so densely that collisions were routine.

Suicide Fucking Hill. You’d get to the top of the hill, get a good running start, and take off with that sled beneath you. There was nothing worse than a bad takeoff on Suicide Hill – the kind where you tumble off of your sled and roll down the hill for a while. You try to regain your footing but kids are aiming for you, taking out your legs and getting you to flip on your as. If you fell of your sled going down Suicide Hill you’d end up at the bottom ten minutes later with open wounds, bruises, and a mild concussion.

Suicide Fucking Hill. Going down face first on a wooden sled was the best – snow kicking up and making your face freeze. You couldn’t see a thing like that; between the chunks of eyes depositing in your eyes and your face being stretched back from the colossal speeds you flew blind all the way down, taking out kids as they scramble for their misplaced sled.

The funny thing about Suicide Hill is the fact that, come spring time, it looks like a baby hill. Seriously – I remember looking at Suicide Hill without snow on it and being so disappointed, you could hardly get a good roll going down the hill when it was grassy. For some reason snow made that damn hill a Black Diamond. The place to be in Brooklyn after a snowstorm.

Suicide Fucking Hill.

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Where’s the snow?

Monday, December 04, 2006

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