Corporal Rodriguez was a Californian. In fact, he was the son of migrant fruit pickers.
I expected him to look back on his childhood and tell me how miserable it was. Instead, he had fond memories of the family gathered around a campfire for meals – and they always had fresh fruit to eat. The corporal was proud of his mother because she was a fruit cutter, and was good at her job. Whenever she finished cutting up one tray of fruit, she would yell “More fruit”. Those two words were vivid in his mind.
Corporal Rodriguez and I were both instructors at the Fort Lewis School Command, and we lived in the barracks that held our classrooms. Since we were isolated from the rest of the School Command, Rodriguez asked me to help him wake up each morning. I was supposed to enter his room and play an LP on his record player at high volume.
I did my task daily: waking him up with “Honky Tonk Women”, “Bad Moon Rising”, and “Chelsea Morning”. One day I discovered that the Army library had an LP called “Artillery Sounds”. Then I would occasionally wake him up with the sound of howitzers.
I opened my window and Rodriguez asked. “Is this snow?”
I quickly realized that Rodriguez, being a Californian, had never seen snow. He had been looking forward to this moment all his life – the moment when he experienced snow, the kind of snow you hear about in Christmas songs and see on Hallmark Cards.
Nobody likes to be the bearer of bad news. What should I do? Should I lie and tell him that, yes, it was snow to keep him happy, or should I burst his bubble and tell him the truth?
I went with the truth. “No, that’s sleet.”
His face changed from ecstasy to disbelief. “Are you sure it’s not snow?”
I repeated the bad news for Corporal Rodriguez: “It’s sleet.”
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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath. Price = $11. You can purchase a copy at http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com
It "snowed" one time while I was living in SF. That, too, was sleet. Not only did I not have the heart to inform them of the difference, they wouldn't have accepted it. It was SNOW.
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