I loved that book as a child. I don’t recall if I was at all aware of the fact that Peter’s skin color was significant. I grew up in a working class neighborhood just on the outskirts of New Haven, with black as well as white families. Later, my Catholic high school was mostly Irish and Italian Catholics (I was both) and African-Americans. All boys. And my father, in particular, always had a lot of black acquaintances from childhood. He and his nine siblings (or at least the first five of them!) grew up in a housing project called Brookside that had been made up of mostly Irish immigrants but at the time of his childhood was becoming increasingly African-American. So maybe at that age I was unaware of the significance.
I do recall, however, enjoying the fact that Peter was playing in the snow in an urban landscape that was familiar to me. There were sidewalks and apartment buildings and lamp posts and traffic signals. This was not the bucolic winter landscape I saw in most children’s stories. This looked like my neighborhood, off of State Street, where my friends and I could walk past the apartment buildings on our way to the A&P or East Rock Market, which still had wide board wooden floors from the previous century, and where my friend Gary’s mother worked the cash register.
Coincidentally, having just this weekend read about the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Snowy Day, it snowed Monday night (Martin Luther King Day, no less), and we woke to a 90 minute delay. I had watched the snowfall late at night with the porch light on, a jazz station tuned in on my laptop, and a glass of sangria left over from a dinner party we hosted on Sunday. My kids woke up full of excitement for the first real snow of the winter. I said to them, “If you want to play in the snow, go do it now while we have a 90 minute school delay, because by the time you get home this evening it will be almost dark and this snow will likely have turned to slush.â€
Both kids were excited. Elsa, who just turned five, asked if she could put her snow clothes on right over her footed pajamas, and was elated when I told her yes. Cormac, who’s eight, just got new snow pants for Christmas, and so this was his first opportunity to try them out.
We just moved to this new place in Storrs last month. We are in a much less urban environment than when we were in Windham, but we also have children on our street here, which we did not in the old house. Our next door neighbors are colleagues of mine, and their youngest boy is only about ten months older than Cormac. I called and invited him to come over and sled in our yard before school. Not only was he excited to come join my kids, as it turns out, I ended up bringing him to school because the delay had caused some morning conflicts for his folks.
The three bundled up kids played in the snow for about three-quarters of an hour, till they got too wet and cold. I watched out the back windows as they sledded down the slight decline in our backyard, and when they disappeared from sight, I re-located them in the adjacent woods beneath some tall pines, shaking the snow from the low branches onto one another’s heads. When they came in, I threw all their stuff into the drier to be warm and toasty for school, and I made hot chocolate with marshmallows for them while they played upstairs till it was time to leave for school.
When I was reading about The Snowy Day in the Courant, Elsa noticed the cover art that accompanied the article, and said, “Hey, we have that book!†Cormac looked up to see what she was pointing at, and said, “Yeah, you used to read that to me when I was little. I loved that book.†So do I.
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