Has anything in life ever been quite so thrilling as the times spent as a child listening to the kitchen radio report school closings due to an approaching blizzard? I would listen intently to the announcer – oh, if only I’d listened to my teachers half as well.

Wednesday, January 30, 2002

Has anything in life ever been quite so thrilling as the times spent as a child listening to the kitchen radio report school closings due to an approaching blizzard? I would listen intently to the announcer – oh, if only I’d listened to my teachers half as well. I’d listen like a man, who had bet his life savings on a horse, listened to the track announcer.

I’d listen to the radio announcer giving cancellations school by school, each one inching closer and closer to my school district. Sometimes, just for orneriness, he would give the school closings in alphabetical order. This would just add to the torture. It was a fiendish thing to do to someone whose school was not near the beginning of the alphabet. My school began with the letter N. I thought it stood for knowledge, but that’s another story.

Why couldn’t I go to school in Albert Lea or Alden or Austin or Adams so I’d be at the beginning of the list? I and everyone like me understood the agony of anticipation. Why didn’t the guy on the radio hurry? Why did he have to spend so much time giving the breakfast special at some restaurant I had never been to and probably would never go to? Who cared about a sale on snow tires? Why didn’t the school officials just give us a break and call off school for the day? What could one day have hurt? Most of us knew more than what was good for us already. Were the powers that be worried that if school were called off that we kids would have too much fun? At least if they called off school, we wouldn’t be able to throw any snowballs at them.

I would have been so happy to miss a day because of snow. A snow day is like a found day. One minute you don’t have it, then you do. A free day. A snow day. Magical words.

I would spend my snow days hoping and praying for more snow. The only thing better than a day off of school because of snow was two days off because of snow. The only bad thing that could ever happen on a snow day would be if you were already off school, sick at home with the flu.

A snow day was a rarity, as every child is all too aware, because most of the serious snowfalls occur on weekends when they can do little good.

The blizzard would hit the towns some distance from us first. We were never on the leading edge of winter storms. We were never on the leading age of anything. The storm would inch its way in our direction; the closings given on the radio moving closer and closer to my school with all of the speed of a glacier. The ticking of the kitchen clock would become almost deafening. It was often a photo finish as the clock and the announcer’s list of school closings raced to the wire. It had become apparent that every school in the entire state of Minnesota had closed except for the one I attended. I could just as well be living in Hawaii. If he didn’t say &uot;New Richland-Hartland Public School&uot; soon, the all too punctual bus driver, Ralphie, would bring his orange conveyance to the end of our driveway. Then it would be too late. On such days, we students, the condemned, would squirm in our bus seats watching the insufficient snowfall with all the gravity of pallbearers.

Ralphie wasn’t much happier. He didn’t want to be in the bus either, especially with a bunch of morose children. Even though we all suspected that Ralphie had become a bus driver only because he hated children, we had no doubt that even he enjoyed seeing the occasional smile. But there were days. Those glorious days when the announcer’s voice would say those few words that I longed to hear, &uot;New Richland-Hartland Public School is closed today.&uot; Oh, be still my heart – the words still get to me. On such days, I’d quickly slurp the last of my cereal – that sugary mess of milk on the bottom of my bowl. What a wonderful day it was. The world was my oyster -&160;whatever that means. It was. How could a person ever be any happier than he was on a snow day?

We didn’t have to be athletes to experience the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.

We knew the thrill and agony of school closings.

Hartland resident Al Batt writes columns for the Wednesday and Sunday editions of the Tribune.