TOF and the Snow

When TOF was a mere TOFling, his father took him one day to visit the GrandTOF. An elderly man of perhaps more than 50 years. When he was a child, the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. Before he died, he would watch on his TV while men walked on the Moon. His first job as a kid involved taking care of rented horses. Two years later, it was rented automobiles.

TOF was complaining, as TOFlings were wont to do, regarding his interminable walk to school -- in the Snow. Now this walk was six blocks, but that is a much longer distance when the legs are shorter. It must have been a mile, at least. TOF especially bemoaned the last four blocks coming home, which were up a hill steeper than El Capitan, or so it seemed, and the snow piled higher than the Matterhorn.

Mon Pere listened to this and shook his head. "That's nothing," he instructed TOF. "When I was your age, I had to walk in snow up to here, indicating with his hand how high it had been piled, or was being piled. School was at least two miles away and the hill down Stockton St. apparently needed ropes and pitons.

The GrandTOF listened to all this and then commented in his basso profundo, chopping his right hand tomahawk-fashion, as was his wont, to time his words. He looked at Pere and said, "Are you crazy? You kids had it so soft! Why, when I was a kid..." And so the school receded farther away and the snow (or something) grew ever deeper. What his father would have said, we shall never know.

As near as TOF can reckon from these data, the previous Ice Age ended about a hundred years ago, just as the world began shrinking.