Grandpa Kevin left early New Year’s morning. I was sorry to see him go. He’d connected me with baseball again, and I’d have gladly given up my room for as long as he’d wanted it to keep that connection.
That was a strange day. The sun was out, which doesn’t happen much in January. But instead of getting warmer, the air grew colder every hour. The sky was strange too. The clouds were high and a different, whiter color than usual.
“It’s going to snow,” my dad said.
My mom groaned. “Don’t say that.”
Seattle has lots of hills and no snowplows. It doesn’t snow often here, but when it does, even if it’s only an inch or two, the whole city shuts down.
“You wait,” he said.
My father spent New Year’s Day watching bowl games on television. He kept asking me to join him, but I couldn’t watch for long. I’d see some quarterback get massacred and I’d think about Josh, and it just wasn’t fun. I went out to the yard and practiced throwing the way Grandpa Kevin had shown me, but even that didn’t work. You can only do so much alone.
We ate dinner. The Fiesta Bowl game was for the national championship. “You’re going to watch that with me, aren’t you?” my dad said. He had a worried look in his eyes, like I was sick or something, so I sat down with him and watched it, or at least pretended to watch it. When the game ended, I was glad to escape to my room. I turned on my radio and flipped through magazines. It was after midnight when I flicked off the light.
I don’t remember going to sleep. I only remember waking up and noticing right away that my room was brighter than it should have been.
I went to the window, and there it was. Snow. Big soft flakes floating down. I could see them in the streetlights, millions and millions of snowflakes, swirling downward.
I stood, mesmerized, and watched as a fine layer of white formed on top of the lawn and the street. Still more snow came. For a while I could still see little patches of green or little bits of gray underneath the cars. Finally even the green and gray patches were gone. There wasn’t a footprint or a tire track anywhere. All the world was white and clean and beautiful. It could have been the very first day of creation.
I don’t know what time it was when I fell back to sleep. Early the next morning there was a tapping on my door. “Ryan,” my mother whispered, “are you awake?”
I almost rolled over and covered my head with the pillow. I don’t know why I didn’t. But for some reason, I answered. “Yeah, I’m awake,” I said.
She opened the door a crack. “Josh is downstairs. Shall I tell him to come back later?”
I sat straight up. “No. No,” I said. “Tell him I’ll be right down.”
There was a pause. Then she continued, her voice lower. “Ryan, he said for you to bring your catcher’s mitt. But you’re not going to play baseball in this, are you?”
I’ll never forget that day. What we were doing was crazy. Snow was still falling, and the white baseball got lost in the flurries, got lost against the totally white backdrop. We were so bundled up we could hardly run or throw. Josh shouted things to me about Los Angeles, and I shouted back to him about my grandfather. I only heard about half of what he said and I figure he heard about the same of what I said. The words didn’t matter. The snow didn’t matter. The cold didn’t matter. I was laughing my head off, and so was Josh. We were playing ball together again.