Hang on, baby

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

I just about broke down this morning when I looked out on my back porch (OK, deck) and saw more snow. Please. I know I’m whining, but I’ll bet many of you feel the same way. I need some spring. Don’t we always get a bit of spring in February when the premature excavators start plowing up the garden like they know something the rest of us don’t? Isn’t that part of the contract for living in Northern Nevada?

My son, Hunter, and I had one of those weekends when much of what we did was a wish on the wind for spring. Saturday, he invited a friend over. We had some of those Estes model rockets that had been sitting in the coat closet for several years, and we thought it was high time to assemble them. The idea was we’d construct them now, take them and a few of Hunter’s friends up to the Black Rock in the spring and put a match to them. The rockets, that is.

“So Matt, which do you prefer, Matt or Matthew?”

“Matthew.”

“Oh.” I like my son’s friends. They’re all suitably individualistic, and they sit around and tell stories and make really sophisticated jokes and cackle like crones when SpongeBob Squarepants’ pants blow off in high seas. It’s kind of funny, they don’t quite know what to think of a dad who looks like a character from All-Star Wrestling and who goes by his first name without a Mr.

I try not to confuse anyone by acting anything other than my emotional/intellectual age—which is about seven years beyond these 10 year olds. I remember being younger than Hunter and his friends are now, breaking chunks of compacted ice off the blacktop lot at school, dreaming that an ice-free parking lot would mean an earlier spring. I guess I was thinking along the same lines when Hunter and I cleaned off the back porch for about the 15th time this winter.

But the weatherman says it might reach 50 degrees on Friday. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.