Remembrance of Snows Past: The New Yorker With one exception, my sledding memories all start around the age of twelve and the great blizzard of "77. But I know I went sledding before then. I just can't remember it. What I dimly remember is sitting up in bed, after the lights were out, and opening the window to discover a tiny drift of pristine white snow on the window ledge. I would take a scoop in my hand and eat it. A delicacy that encompassed not just a soft texture, and cold, but a sense that I was engaging in the nightlife of the city, just by sticking my hand outside the window. Still, what about sledding? Where are the sledding memories? Snow - what comes to mind immediately is the snow storm in N.Y. many years ago. I think we still lived on eighty-first street opposite the Hayden Planetarium - a small house next to the sprawling Beresford. 11 W. 81st St. The Hayden House, eighth floor. I remember climbing over huge, well packed snow mounds. I remember the first time I was incredulous - and grateful - noticing the generosity of New Yorkers in times of adversity. Everyone was friendly, involved, helpful. People talking to one another, exchanging information, joking. It was with Papa that you did most of the snow surfing in the park. I remember your red nose and hair in disarray coming up the snowy slope. You loved the snow and gliding down over it, unperturbed by the cold. I can't recall any special event connected with the snow. The few times I glided with you I remember your exhilaration, which was infectious, that helped me to overcome the freezing cold. I went sledding with my father? In Riverside Park? I don't recall. Why not! Why is so much of childhood lost to us? What evolutionary purpose does this vanishing serve? Would there be something about these early childhood memories that would confuse or inconvenience us as we molted into adolescents and adults? Is sexual feeling such a fascist state that all that came before it must be totally eradicated? When I was a kid, nuclear war or nuclear meltdown were part of the psychic landscape. Sometimes, sitting in Ms. Ryan's geometry class, I would find myself wishing for one or the other. I distinctly recall lying in bed one night and staring out at the orange-ish sky; the clouds were low and threatening; snow was called for but had not arrived. I was hoping for a torrent of snow, and the ensuing snow day. If not that, as a backup, I remember thinking, maybe that orange means there has been some kind of nuclear attack. Such were my priorities at the age of fourteen. To this day, I like an impending snow storm. I love the storm itself. I love being inside during the storm, and also, being outside, in the midst of the blizzard or the soft falling of flakes, whichever. As long as it sticks. The problems with snow always accumulate, so to speak, after it has stopped falling and starts becoming something else - ice, slush, water, all of it dirty. The very pristineness of snow, which is a big part of its appeal, is what makes its metamorphosis into a slurpy of filth so depressing. The Flexible Flyer sled was ubiquitous in my childhood. The body was wood. The frame was metal, painted red except for the front, which was silver, like the fender of a car. An eagle or some kind of war-like bird served as its logo, centered on the wooden slats. You saw it between your legs if you rode sitting up, steering with your feet, or a rope. If you lay down on your stomach, which is what I mostly did, your heart beat directly over that fierce bird. The lettering itself was ornate, faintly Victorian, but it did not evoke a pastoral. It was a festive contraption. The parts moved. It was built for speed. I know this not so much from memories of sledding on a Flexible Flyer, and not from pictures - belonging, as I do, to those generations for whom photographs were, if not scarce, then somehow special. My image of this childhood sled derives from an encounter of not too many years ago, when I found one in my mother's closet. It was shortly after my daughter was born. We were excavating the closet in my old bedroom so that my little family would have room to visit for extended stays. My mother's closets were so stuffed with things that each one was like a miniature attic, crowded to point that mere entry was almost impossible. Sometimes this was oppressive. More often it was magical. It was as though each of my mother's closets were one of those circus volkswagens out of which clowns would continuously pour. I had mixed feelings about bringing all the ancient mysteries into the light. But I was going to have to drag them out of the closet, and ultimately the apartment, if I wanted to see my daughter crawling around and playing with my mother. So out came the mysteries. Clothes, shoes, boxes of papers, vases, old set designs from my mother's dance company, various costumes from same. And then, ridiculously, an entire sled. A Flexible Flyer. It had a sturdiness, a weight, that immediately identified it as coming from another time. I noticed a name scrawled in block letters on the handle: Billie Werther (actually, this was not the real name; I've changed it, and the others mentioned in this piece, to protect peoples" privacy). I felt a chill. Billie was my childhood friend William's older sister. I must have borrowed his sled, which turned out to be his sister's sled, and held onto it for a span of decades. For a few years, between ages ten and fourteen or so, I saw a lot of William and by extension Billie. Like many older siblings she lived in another world. Clogs, reddish long hair, blue eyes lined with black eyeliner. I recall the night when, sleeping over at William's house, Billie, who shared a room with him, had been sequestered elsewhere in the apartment because, as his mother put it to William in front of me, "Your friends are getting to be too old to spend a night in the room with Billie." Whether this was weighted towards the friends, i.e. me, or towards Billie, I didn't know. William had told me outrageous stories of his sister's sexual adventures. I was inclined not to believe them. At the time, my thoughts about Billie, unquestionably full of longing, were fairly innocent. But her mother was just ahead of the game. At some point in the next year they became entirely non-innocent. The older siblings of your friends! I am not sure how this worked with girls, but with boys the dynamic could be fraught. I can still see her standing in the doorway one morning when I had come over to play - bare feet, pale, smooth, chunky legs, panties just hidden by the length of T-shirt, breasts, mouth, eyes. We stared at each other. Her expression registered mild disappointment. We spoke rarely and mostly about diet strategies (we were both heavy). That moment at the front door probably lasted all of two seconds but it felt like an hour, and I would have been happy if it had gone on all day. The exertion of not staring at her breasts was so complete that it was a miracle I didn't fall to my knees. I croaked, "Hello," as I passed into the apartment and headed towards William's room. Now I stared at this antique that had emerged from my mother's closet, intact and ready to go, and reflected that I could use the occasion to write William, or Billie, and have a reunion of sorts. But this seemed melodramatic. William and I had drifted as high school went on; he was very smart, but somehow apart from everyone, and I had my own problems. Once, as we completed a pot deal - he was always well connected, and I was buying in bulk - he nodded at the typewriter in his room and said, "This is an "A" paper in progress." I had no doubt it was an "A" paper. William was one of the brightest kids I knew. But there was something off about the declaration; it was too boastful and hollow, somehow, as though he had read instructions on how to brag. I wanted to tell him, that's not how you do it. But I was in no position to lecture. So the sled was swept off into storage along with all the other stuff that neither I nor my mother were ready to throw out. My wife rolled her eyes at this. I had recently read that Proust kept all his parents" furniture, no matter how beat up, near him through his life. This was consoling. William and I were part of a tight little group of four that functioned as something of a unit from around the ages of ten to fourteen. He and I were the Riverside Drive contingent; the other two were on Central Park West. We were West-siders at a school mostly populated by East-siders. After the blizzard of "77 we traversed Central Park. That was the apotheosis of snow-day bliss, three days in a row. But William and I must have had more low-key sledding adventures in Riverside Park, too. Where had I been sledding the day I took his sister's Flexible Flyer and didn't bring it back? These memories would have been merely quaint except for the fact that a couple of years after that Flexible Flyer surfaced, I heard that William killed himself. Had kids. Was a Libertarian. Involved with computers. The facts were paltry and absurd. But I had lost touch completely, and this is what happens in such situations - you get the last twenty years compressed into a forensics report. The news rippled through the old high-school diaspora. I wrote to a friend from that time to confirm. "Yes, William did a very bad thing," he wrote back. The guy had little kids. I wondered if this childish phrasing was the result of being with them, talking to them, or if he was just speaking from our point of view from the days when we all hung out - young kids who would often get in trouble. I wrote Billie, now an adult, a long letter about her brother. She wrote back gratefully, distressed. An adult with kids and a life. I didn't mention the Flexible Flyer. By then it had moved to a storage closet somewhere else in town that was again packed to the brim with stuff. Part of it was I didn't want to go dig it out. And part of it was I couldn't bear presenting it to her, this object of our youth, almost a corpse in its own right. It just seemed ridiculous - "Here, on the occasion of losing your brother, I want you to have your old sled back." Now I have a daughter who gets excited at the mention of snow and loves to sled. We've got a piece of colorful shaped plastic; it's an efficiency not just of production - no moving parts - but also of gravity - just a thin sheath between you and the snow. A couple of years ago, the last huge storm we were here for, I took her to that steep hill on eighty-ninth street in Riverside Park next to The Soldier's and Sailor's Monument. We rode down a few times laughing like crazy until she fell off and her pants got pulled down, at which point I realized she was wearing, A., pajama pants, thin as a T-shirt and, B., no underwear. I couldn't believe it, started shouting "Oh My God! Pull Up Your Pants! I was amazed at how she tolerated the cold. She's a polar bear. She was laughing her head off. I went nuts and insisted we rush home. I carried her most of the way, feeling guilty that I had not dressed her properly. Part of me likes the idea of fishing out that old Flexible Flyer and riding with her on it. But Billie's name is on there and it might feel too weird. So it sits in a dark storage room in a basement, like an archaeological relic. I can picture it though, and still hear the hissing sound of its blades cutting through the packed white snow, and feel the distance between my body and the ground rushing past beneath me. When I was around a year and a half I started hanging out with Mel my upstairs neighbor of the same age, and we stayed close until I was about eleven or twelve years old. As soon as I write this, I realize that maybe my father dying had something to do with my being around him so much. His dying was not a long process - in and out of the hospital, cancer - but living with the diagnosis, and the worry, went on for years, thoughÂ it wasn't my worry. I didn't know about it until the very end, the last year or even less than that, when he got sick. I spent a lot of time with our friends upstairs. Once they took me to their country house. Driving back, the three kids, Joe, Mel, and me, all fell asleep. At some point, the sun was setting low enough over the Hudson that it streamed into the car, filling it with a deep orange glow, and woke me. Joe, a few years younger, had slid down in the back seat and lay half on the floor of the car. I was bleary eyed, still half asleep, and so was he. He looked up at me. I looked down at him. His dreamy brown eyes were fixed on mine. I had a very strong sense of worry about my father, the first time I had thought of it that weekend, and felt, for some reason, that Joe understood this, or knew what I was thinking. A faint play of freckles across the bridge of his nose, he was a very beautiful boy. None of us would have thought about it that way at the time, but in hindsight I can see it. He was touched by something, an aura of fate. You could feel it even when he was seven. What kind of fate was unclear. Joe was adopted. "His mother was an eighteen-year-old junkie," Mel, also adopted, informed me matter-of-factly on a number of occasions. That his mother was discussed at all was owing to the fact that one day when they were home alone the intercom rang and the doorman said someone was there who wanted to see Joe. He went downstairs, had an impromptu meeting with his deranged birth mother in the lobby, then came back upstairs. Now he was just a glazed, sleep-addled seven-year-old. But I remember that look, and the fiery sunset over the Hudson as we came down the Henry Hudson Parkway. And it turns out my father had died that weekend. There must have been other reasons we all stopped hanging out. I'm not sure what they were. Most of the sledding in my neighborhood took place on that hill at around eighty-second street behind the playground, in Riverside Park. It is just steep enough for some drama, and levels off into the field where in summer we would play softball, where you could glide for a long time. Joe drove me and Mel completely crazy because at a certain point, as we messed around with our G.I. Joes or whatever else, Joe would call out with a plaintive cry whose every sonic dimension I can still inwardly hear: "Mo-om! Mel and Thomas aren't letting me play! And the refrain, from another room, stern and in no uncertain terms from their mother: "Mel! Play with your brother! When my friendship with Mel, so tight since age two, maxed out, and dissipated, and both he and Joe became people I said hi to in the elevator or on the street, perhaps on my way to my new friend William's house. Mel and Joe and me must have come down that hill at eighty-second street in Riverside Park a hundred times. There was one time, though, that is very vivid, maybe my most vivid sledding memory, and it took place in the weird, sharply sloping hill just beside the entrance to Riverside Park at eighty-fourth Street where Mel, Joe, and I had decided to sled. That there might be a reason it wasn't widely used for sledding did not occur to us. In summertime, this was a dense and spooky bramble. At the age of seven, against the rules, I was exploring back there with a friend when we encountered a man with dark, slick backed hair carrying a plastic bag, with whom we had a brief conversation that had somehow lead, in that strangely dreamy way of youth-logic, to his big, pale penis hanging out from his fly, and his encouraging us to touch it. I declined on the grounds it might have germs. But my friend and I had to discuss it. For this reason, the hill may have seemed a tiny bit loaded and dangerous. But now it was winter, and a fresh snow had fallen, thick and deep with a perfect crust of ice. The sky had cleared and was a bright, blinding blue. We ambled into the park with our sleds, no longer tykes, exactly, but still packed up like Michelin Men. I had a Flexible Flyer. This is part of the mystery of Billie's sled. I had one of my own. How had I ended up with hers? Had there been an accidental switch? It only took a few tries down the hill to figure out why this was not a popular spot. You didn't have much room, but it was steep enough to get a good speed going. But at the bottom of the hill were the park benches on the riverside promenade. With proper steering, you could hit the interval between the two. But we hardly had to time get tired of smashing into the concrete supports of the benches before the incident with the dogs. There were two of them and they seemed to be playing. Of course it was Joe who they jumped on. Brown, lithe Doberman Pinschers. Their clipped ears covered in white bandages. They had prominent snouts and ferocious teeth. I don't know how long it took to grasp that the playful dogs jumping around Joe, who had just smashed into one of the benches, were not being playful. Or at least that Joe did not see it that way. Such brightness, such glare on the snow, and Joe with his hands up near his face, ducking his head down and then thrashing upward, when I saw his tears. The dog's owner got them under control soon enough. But Joe cried for a long time. This is what happens to younger brothers, I thought. They never catch a break. We went home and I don't recall ever sledding there again. Years later Joe killed himself. There is a story. Drugs, many other things. I wont defame him by summarizing it, even if that were possible. By the time it happened, they had moved out of the building. "We lost Joe," is what his mother told my mother, who told me. I had seen him around on the street, big hat and army jacket, his virtuoso piano playing now turned towards the Doors. He had been into psychedelics. His mother, I had heard, had gone to Central Park once, at dawn, and found him on the rocks in the Great Lawn. There had been some time at Phoenix House. Yet, maybe because it was psychedelics, it didn't seem a very edgy or dangerous situation. But who can tell? He went to a gun shop with bullets in his pocket. One of those shops behind the police building in what is now the edge of Chinatown; then it was Little Italy. He took the gun, put a bullet in the chamber, and did it right there. I went sledding with many people who did not kill themselves. Why do these memories force their way to such prominence? Maybe the juxtaposition of that celestial feeling of snow everywhere, the cessation of all the rituals, most importantly school itself. Maybe it's the incredible passivity of having just toppled off a sled into the snow - nature's very own posturepedic mattress, where you are plastered into immobility and there is nothing to do but lie there. Or make angels. Which is to say that even if you are not lying there moving your arms and legs, you feel on such snowy days, as a kid, like you are in heaven. This sounds nice until you really focus on the sentiment, as seen from a kid's point of view - it means life is over, the suspense of what is going to happen has been relieved. All the corrupting messiness of experience has been avoided, cheated. You, and the snow, will stay pristine forever. Photograph by Emily Anne Epstein/Corbis.