A Good Day

Tom was one of my best buddies in high school.  Yeah, we had the same name; an unfortunate coincidence.  Tom and I had a number of interesting adventures.  This isn’t one of them.

Tom had a teammate on the gymnastics team that he wanted to adopt as another one of our best buds.  When Tom described this guy to me I was surprised that Tom wanted to include this guy as one of our close colleagues.  His name was Gray.  Gray was an apt name for this fellow.  It was not only his name, but also his personality.

Gray wasn’t a bad guy, but he was so quiet and, well, normal, that nobody really noticed him.  He had few friends and he had no interests outside of gymnastics.  He was of average height, average weight, and average everything else you can think of.  Perhaps the only thing exceptional about Gray was his strength, which was a natural byproduct of his chosen sport, gymnastics.  I suspected that Gray was quite intelligent, but he was always so quiet that I couldn’t quite be sure.

So it became our mission during our junior year in high school to include Gray in our activities whenever possible.  This wasn’t easy since Gray’s normal routine was to go to school, go to gymnastics practice, and then stay at home until it was time to go to school again.  This included weekends.  He didn’t willingly leave his house except for school.  Gray was a teenage recluse.

There was this one winter weekend when Tom and I convinced Gray to go tobogganing with us on a Saturday afternoon.  I have no doubt that it took some cajoling to get Gray to leave his house and go with us.  My family had an 8-man wooden toboggan (a year from now it will become a 10-man toboggan) that might comfortably hold 6 real people, and was just perfect for 3 rambunctious boys, well, at least two of us anyway. 

My dad encouraged adventures of all kinds, so naturally we had a toboggan in the rafters of our garage.  Remind me to tell you about our episode with the WWII 45 caliber semiautomatic handgun.  Also remind me to tell you about the days camping on the island in the middle of the Mississippi River up near McGregor, Iowa. 

Anyway, Tom, Gray, and I got the toboggan out of the rafters of the garage and tied it onto the top of Mom’s car and headed off to Jones Park.  Jones Park was on the far side of Cedar Rapids and had one of the few major hills in the city that was bare of trees.  The Parks Department had even built a toboggan ramp to facilitate the activity.

We parked at the bottom of the hill so that we would have a short walk to the car after our last toboggan run.  We trudged up the hill through the deep fluffy snow next to the toboggan run, noting that the run itself was tightly packed due to hundreds of transits (Good word!), all of which is irrelevant to the main point of the story but provides a modicum of context.

We finally made our way to the top of the hill, waited impatiently in line, and began our trip down the hill on the toboggan.  Jones Park had a hellacious hill, so the ride was fast and long.  It was a notable achievement if your run took you beyond the hard packed snow of all the other riders into the fluffy untouched snow at the base of the hill.  Since all three of us were jocks in the minor sports we felt compelled to use our hands to pull ourselves forward into the virgin snow, thereby “winning” the toboggan run by distance, as if such a competition existed.

Since none of us fell off during the run, I threw Tom off the toboggan.  It had to be done.  It is bad form to finish a toboggan run without a disaster of some kind along the way; either real or contrived.  Tom in turn yanked me off the toboggan, whereupon we both tackled Gray and knocked him into the soft snow on the other side of the toboggan. Thus began an hour-long wrestling match in the snow.

It was a cold subzero day, so we were all wearing multiple layers of long underwear, blue jeans, t-shirts, sweatshirts, and gloves.  We didn’t look exactly like the Pillsbury Doughboy, but we came close.  There was no way we could hurt each other without a direct blow to the head. 

Over the course of the hour we changed allegiances frequently and without notice.  It was Tom and Tom against Gray, then Tom and Gray against Tom, then the other Tom and Gray against Tom, then everybody against everybody, and then back through the rotation again.  We wrestled and beat on each other without pause, laughing and giggling at our ineffective efforts.  We yelled insults, faked horrific blows, roared in mock indignation, and attempted to wrestle each other to submission. I’d never seen Gray so happy, as was I.

For one hour we were little kids again.  For one hour we were able to escape the all-consuming worries of a teenager’s life.  Gone were thoughts of chores, term papers, homework, grades, girlfriends, college searches, the future, and the expectations of parents, teachers, coaches, and classmates.  We were little kids again, and we celebrated the moment by gleefully thrashing each other.

We never made it back up the hill for a second toboggan run; we were too exhausted from wrestling.  Still, we went home happy.  It remains one of my fondest memories of those days.