What I Did On My Christmas Vacation
My friend Cody Debbs and me went sledding (sliding?) and we almost caused a pile-up on I-90. We didn't mean to.
It started with Cody and me playing Grand Theft Auto on my X-Box, and I guess we had it kinda loud and we got kinda loud, too, and my mother came in the room. She yelled at us. "Go play outside," she said. "And take your cousin Normie with you."
Normie is a real pain of a little kid—3 years old. He's from Florida, and he doesn't speak much, but he's best buds with my dog, Rex. Oh, I forgot to tell you, my cousin is here because his mom and dad are here visiting my mom and dad.
Well, my mom stuffs Normie into this old snowsuit I wore when I was little, and Cody and me get in our coats and boots and gloves and caps. And Mom opens the door and says don't come back for an hour when she'll have lunch ready.
So out we all go. Rex, too. He likes the snow.
It was Cody who thought up the idea of going sledding, that if we got to drag my little cousin along, he might like it since they don't have snow in Florida.
We ask Normie and he nods. He can't do much more, wrapped up as he is in that snowsuit.
Well, all Cody and me got is two old hand-me-down plastic snow sleds. Each is too small for two kids to ride on one, and we knew we'd get in trouble if we sent Normie down Mount Crashmore alone . . . and then I remembered this giant snow saucer in the window at the Ace hardware store. That's only a block from where I live. So we put Normie on my snowsled, and we drag him behind us down the sidewalk to the store, Rex romping around us, playing in the snow. At the store, we all stand outside the window looking at the giant saucer, and Cody and me are drooling at the possibilities.
Well, the owner, Mister Hockerman, he comes outside and asks if he can help us. Cody and me know Mister Hockerman because we buy parts from him for our old Snapper lawnmower we have for our summertime business, our Cody & Me Lawnmowing Company.
We tell him we'd like to buy the giant saucer so we can take my cousin sledding (sliding?) and how much does he want for it?
"How much money you got?" he asks.
We empty our pockets. It's not much, but Mister Hockerman says maybe we'd like to make a business-to-business deal, since Cody and me are businessmen like him. He says he'll accept our six dollars and twenty-eight cents—that's what we had—for a down payment if we'll work off the rest in the summer by mowing the lawn in front of his store.
That sounded like an okay deal to Cody, and I thought it was pretty good, too, so we shake hands and Mister Hockerman brings the saucer outside for us.
We drag it away, with my cousin sitting in the middle of the saucer, to Mount Crashmore over behind the Sentry store. When the wind is right, it can make some real big drifts near the bottom of our sledding hill.
We trudge our way up to the top and we tell Normie we're all getting in the saucer with him and we'll ride her down the hill together. He's excited. So I get in and get Normie between my knees, and Rex hops in and he sits down next to me. And Cody gives us a push and then he jumps in.
Now you need to know a snowsled or board, you can control that. But you can't steer a saucer and we forgot that. A saucer goes where it wants to go.
Ours bounced a couple times over rocks or tree roots or maybe the dead body of a sledder buried in the snow and changed course with the drifts, and we were going faster and faster. Cody, he's yelling. Normie's screaming. Old Rex is barking. We're going really fast now, I mean really fast, faster than the cars in Grand Theft Auto. We hit the last drift and it acts like a ski jump and shoots us over the fence at the edge of the Interstate, and we slam down on the other side—on the bank made by the snowplow—and shoot across the first lanes between a semi and one of those little Kia Souls that the rapping hamsters drive, across the median that spins us like a battle top, across the far lanes right in front of some old lady in a Cadillac honking her horn, and she goes off in the ditch and we slingshot down the exit ramp—still spinning—past a state patrolman stopped at the stop sign at the bottom and into the Red Lobster parking lot.
When we stop spinning, Normie's not screaming anymore. He's laughing and says can we do it again? But the patrolman—he caught up with us—he wouldn't let us. He loads us in the backseat of his car – to take us to jail where all bad boys belong, he says.
Cody and me plead with him not to, and Normie's crying, and Rex barfs in the back of the car. And that must have done it because he took us home.
Mom, after she got the story and all from the patrolman, she let us "stay inside" for the rest of our vacation.
© Jerry Peterson.
