For My Kids

who cannot believe they had to go to school this morning.

I know parents have been doing this since the beginning of time but I've got to get this off my chest before my brain explodes. Doing it online ensures that I will not have to endure the eye rolling and whispered incredulity that tends to accompany my blasts from the past.

When I was your age.....
The time, January 21, 1982, the place, Minneapolis. I was attending the Minneapolis College of Art and Design at the age of eighteen, living in an apartment just south of downtown Minneapolis. Two days after a record breaking seventeen inches of snow in twenty four hours, on top of roughly eight inches of snow already on the ground, we experienced a second record breaking snow of twenty inches in twenty four hours with drifting up to ten feet. Add to that lows of negative twenty degrees or less. Real degrees, not wind chill. Awesome doesn't begin to describe it. My roommate, her boyfriend and I built a snow fort about the size of a city block. But, did they cancel classes? N. O. Not only that, but I didn't have a car so I was, indeed, walking to school in ten feet of snow.

I wasn't barefoot though. I'll give you that.