Bad Weather and a Late Friend

Today we were wondering if it will come a big snow this year. With all the global warming they speak of, I have my doubts. Now, they think a big shelf slid off a glacier, which could possibly cause havoc in time.

A big heavy snow in Georgia is a rare occurrence anyway. Every time I think of something big like that I remember the ice storm we had in March 1961.

The area was not prepared for it, so virtually most of Metro Atlanta shut down. All businesses, but emergency types came to a stand still.

But, that did not prevent us from going out and playing in it. A friend’s father owned a used car lot. We took his worse car out and tried things that we normally would not take a chance doing in. We tried to climb hills, and having a thrill sliding back down, after the car couldn’t make it, we went to a shopping center freshly built and would spin around there and even took the car out in the woods spinning around.

We finally ended up at the town’s country club. We heard the youth were gathering there to slide down the long rolling hill of the golf course. We got there and our friends were slipping in the kitchen outside door of the country club and coming out with serving trays and sliding down the icy hill with those.. Some had cardboard boxes they flattened out and a couple of friends had a car hood turned over they were sleighing down the hill in.

I ended up with a round serving tray, which I didn’t realize it until I started down hill is that a round tray spins as you go down, which makes it harder to control than a rectangle tray. I slid down to the bottom of the hill into a pond. Luckily enough it was only about 3 ft deep.

I walked out, with cold water sloshing from my pants and boots with every step. Then I was too uncomfortable to play anymore.

I went to visit a late friend’s mother. My friend, was killed in a drag race in June of 1960, less than a year before. I kept telling myself to go visit her, but just didn’t have the time or how to act.

She was very glad to see me, even wet and frozen as I was. She gave me some of her late son’s clothes so I could get out of wet clothes. She fixed hot chocolate and banana bread and we had a very nice visit, most the afternoon. We talked about her son, and the things we used to do – she wanted to hear all of it.

To this date, every time I eat banana bread I think of her.

The last year while looking for some dates of some of my relatives in a cemetery I knew it was the same cemetery my friend was buried in, so I found his grave, and his mother and father were buried in the same plot. His mother, the lady I visited, died in 1997, not that long ago. Back then, I knew his father was sick and died, but I forgot or just didn’t realize how close their deaths were. The father died in 1959 and my friend died in 1960.