RAMBO AND THE WOLLMAN ICE RINK

Here's a Winter-time story to help you beat the Summer heat! The house where I grew up as a kid had this weird driveway where the garage was built under the family room. To park the family car inside the garage meant driving down a slope with a stone wall to either side. Mid-West winters ran from picturesque to downright dangerous with this driveway and in between watching ABC's "Wide World of Sports", I thought it was a scream to watch my father backing his car out during countless failed Olympian attempts and burning rubber. I'd pull out a kitchen chair and kneel on it with my hands on the living room windowsill watching this spectacle. Very exciting! (Looking back, I could have used a bag of buttered pop corn) After some close calls with the wall, my father pulled what I call a "Sly Stallone" (RAMBO) and attached a garden hose to the hot water tap on the basement sink to melt the ice--and it worked! It was the "thrill of victory" over the "agony of defeat". Parked safely atop the driveway, he closed the wooden garage door and joined my two brothers and I for lunch--ham sandwiches! We watched the TV for a couple of hours when a meter reader from the City Water Department made his way around the back of our weird driveway. Dressed in rubber galoshes, corduroy pants, a winter coast and a Flap Cap that reminded me of the "Floyd R. Turbo" character from "The Tonight Show", he walked along as he called out: "Meter reader!...Water man!...Meter reader!" (This was our cue to open the garage door to give the guy access to the water meter in the basement). Realizing that the water had re-frozen on the driveway, my brothers and I looked at each other with eyes as big as saucers and yelled out "THE DRIVEWAY!" as we jumped up and scrambled to the basement stairs. The last words we heard as we reached the basement door to the garage were: "Water... METER!-METER!!-METER!!!-METER!!!!" followed by a loud crash against the garage door. Poor guy. Opening the door, we found him sprawled out on his back with his clip board ten feet away. We helped him to his feet and brought him inside for some hot chocolate. My father's fresh glaze of frozen ice would have made Donald Trump as proud as he was the day he cut the ribbon for the newly-renovated Wollman Ice Rink in New York's Central Park! Despite my mother's pleadings for years to get my father to back out the family car at the first sight of a snow storm, my father never listened. But it was never boring!