At age 12, soon after Christmas, a major snowstorm hit, nixing school. My neighbor Virgil and I, both at home alone, trudged across the nearby golf course in high spirits, him sporting a pricey shearling coat, his main gift.
The course was bounded by a creek, which we found to be frozen. Or partially, as we realized when Virgil crackled through and plunged to his chest. I extended a tree limb to drag him out.
The trudge back was subdued. Only my legs had gotten wet, but I was shivering uncontrollably, and Virgil’s white fleece trim, now caramel, had frozen solid. At home he discovered he was locked out. I had my key, but our place had no laundry dryer, and he was in a panic about the coat. Luckily, he knew a way to break in.
Our houses, built at the end of the Depression, each had a long-disused metal door, roughly three feet wide, built into the foundation at ground level. In those earlier times a guy would deliver coal by shoveling it through the opening and down a chute to a boiler, now long gone.
Virgil managed to pry the hatch open but hesitated to squirm through on his belly and cause even more damage to the coat. Then he hit upon a solution: He would lay face up on a cheap toboggan and carefully scooch forward until he could reach an overhead water pipe in the basement and swing his legs inside.
I was still deciding where to grip the wet plastic for support when he shot through the hatch with a shriek and crashed to the concrete floor. He landed on his head yet broke his leg.
It took me several minutes to squirm inside without stepping on him, and another ten to get him upstairs, where he phoned and asked his no-nonsense father to leave work early. He wouldn’t let me wash the coat, and there was nothing else I could do, really.
The next time I saw Virgil his cast was covered with signatures and due to come off any day. He never told me how he explained the incident to Dad.
