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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
April 26, 2009
Previously unpublished fiction.
© 2009 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Skiers, 1997
© 1997 by Bud Grossmann
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BONO FIDE SKI STORIES
In your e-mail you told me, “I’m planing to go to Bon’s house at 10am.” Hmm. Please excuse me, but I can’t recall your mentioning a Bon before. I infer that Bon’s home must be quite distant if you intend to go by plane. (Forgive me, Madame Secretary, for my finding fault once again with your 80wpm typing. Oh, and, yes, I realize, I now must proof my own page, and proof it once again.)
I’m wondering if you perhaps meant Bono. Unfortunately, I’ll have to confess I don’t know Bono, either, now that poor Sonny is gone. I am beginning to think you may be right, that I need to get a television so we can share a common vocabulary.
Later. The mystery of Bon has led me to squander a quarter of an hour on Wiki pages for Bono, Sonny Bono, and Congresswoman Mary Bono Mack. I glimpsed a few facts of uncertain value.
One fact startled me, and I should have remembered it, should not have found it surprising: that Congressman Sonny Bono has been gone a decade, actually a decade and a year. He was killed, as you probably know, when he collided with a tree while he was skiing, more years ago than I’d have guessed.
Far as I can recall, the first and only time I myself ever skied was on a weekend day trip when I was in college in Oakland. I went to The Snow with a young lady from Sunnyvale and her family. Great fun.
Exactly thirty years went by before I visited a ski resort again, and this time it was on Mt. Hood, in the very last days of December of 1997. My wife and a family friend chose the vacation destination; I just sort of tagged along. I did not ski. Our kids skied while I—prudent, cautious, cowardly, whatever—watched and took pictures. I drank beer with my pal Stan beside the fireplace in Timberline Lodge.
On the sunny next-to-last day of the year, our son, age sixteen and frail from muscular dystrophy, traveled up and down the mountain on a special single ski with a seat, and with an expert skier tethered behind to steer. Our daughter, ten years old then and full of life, went out the same afternoon with teenaged cousins and ventured beyond the beginners’ slope. She took a fall, tore tendons in a knee, and had to be hauled back to the lodge on a rescue sled.
Two days later we heard on the news that Michael Kennedy (son of Robert and Ethel) had died on New Year’s Eve after slamming into a tree while skiing near Aspen. Six days into the new year, Sonny Bono did the same thing, near South Lake Tahoe. He died on the scene, in the snow.
My daughter’s damaged knee and the ski-slope deaths of those two men of celebrity have furnished me an excuse to remain cautious, cowardly, prudent, whatever. I would enjoy going again to a ski resort. I’d like, again, to watch while others risk their limbs and lives. I’d like to take pictures, make conversation, and drink beer by the fire, in the lodge. ♦
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