Remember the gummi bear!

This was the oleander tree outside my house yesterday -- the ice-covered branches were heavy and bending toward the ground. (Oleander, by the way, is poisonous -- so don't ever eat the leaves. This is what the landscaper said after he planted it next to my house... and I'm so glad he did, because sometimes I get REALLY hungry...) This is about as "wintery" as the weather gets in Austin. Although we did get about two inches of snow last year -- I happened to be in New Jersey at the time, so I missed it. Other than that, the most "snow" Austin has gotten over the last couple decades has been more akin to dandruff on the lawn than real, honest-to-goodness snow. In fact, I remember the last real Austin snowstorm quite fondly.

I actually lived in upstate New York near Buffalo until I was nine years old. We got so much snow that Eric and I could not only build snowmen, but entire homes in which our snow families could live. ("Here's the bedroom... the living room is to the left... we're having satellite TV installed on Tuesday!") When I was nine we moved to Austin, and there was an abrupt end to our winters of snow-based construction. And when I was 13, we moved up to New Jersey, and the regular bouts of snow returned (although not quite as regular as Buffalo...).

It was right before we moved to New Jersey, when I was almost 13 years old, that Austin was blessed with a snowstorm. My aunt and cousins Steve and Kevin happened to be visiting from Buffalo at the time. The day they were scheduled to fly home, the grey-blanketed skies above Texas exploded in a flurry of white confetti. The city, which was completely unprepared for such a storm, eventually slid to halt. But before it did, flights were still running -- or perhaps they were simply "postponed" with the assumption that snow in Austin never lasts very long. So we piled into our car with my aunt and cousins and made the extremely slow drive down to the airport, on roads that had never seen a snowplow. I'm not sure Austin HAS a snowplow...

When we got there, the airport was nearly deserted, but according to the departures board, the flight to Buffalo was still expected to take off at some point. So we all headed to the gate (this, of course, was back when it was acceptable for anyone to hang out at an airport gate) and waited, bored, for something to change.

I'm not sure who noticed the gummi bear first. But one of us -- either me, or Eric, or Steve, or Kevin -- saw a little orange gummi bear sitting at the edge of the check-in counter at the gate. And since we were extremely bored kids, and the airport was pretty much empty, we decided to wile away the time with a spirited game of gummi bear soccer. Eric and Kevin versus Steve and me. We went out to the open area between gates, and started playing. The little orange candy bear was hard to keep track of, but we managed to run and kick our way to a full-fledged game. Score for Eric and Kevin... score for Steve and Lisa... the teams were competitive and well-matched, and it was anybody's game. I'm sure Steve and I, being the older siblings, had the advantage. We were bending it like Beckham with a gelatinous kids' treat. The score must've been close, but as Kevin got ready to drop-kick the gummi into play once more, everyone braced for one final fight to the goal. He dropped the bear and kicked it -- an orange flash flew into the air... it crossed over the bright lights of the airport gummi soccer field... I shielded my eyes from the glare... the gummi had to be somewhere on our side of the field... I scanned the carpet, knowing I had to get to that gummi before Eric and Kevin found it. But the gummi bear was nowhere to be seen. I couldn't find it... Steve couldn't find it... Eric and Kevin couldn't find it. We searched behind chairs and counters, on windowsills and newsstand carts, we even searched the bathrooms. The little orange gummi bear had simply disappeared.

We never figured out what happened to that gummi bear. Eventually the Austin airport cancelled all flights, and we made the slippery trek back home, where my aunt called family and friends in BUFFALO to tell them she was snowed-in -- in TEXAS. After that day, any time Eric and I had a chance to see our cousins, we would part ways with an earnest, "remember the gummi bear!" in rememberance of our little candy friend. I'd like to think that the gummi bear landed on someone's luggage, where it was transported to an entirely new place to experience entirely new adventures. And maybe, even after all these years, the little orange gummi bear is still out there, providing bored kids with enough spark of imagination to make monotonous time fly, and snowy days even more fun.