Saturday Night

Yesterday was the first snow of the year; a fluffy six inches had already fallen by evening, and children flocked outside to celebrate by building snowmen and throwing snowballs at passing cars. The teenagers and twenty-somethings (few of them though there are) were also out in force celebrating the first snow in their own special way, which is packing a bunch of people into a car, drinking a case of beer, and spinning donuts on street corners. I spent the first half of the evening pushing a friend's car out of the ditch, covering up the evidence that they had utterly demolished two road signs on their way into said ditch, and helping them get their car open after they locked the keys inside while it was still running, still in the ditch, and still full of empties. I spent the second half of the evening learning the finer points of a power slide in a muffler-less 1993 Ford pickup, Hamm's in hand. Smell that? That's Americana.