Snowed in Palm Springs

Your baby wasn’t a baby no more the year it snowed in Palm Springs. You remember that year, don’t you? Your baby had just learned to pull baby pants up or down over that little juicy baby bum and squat on a potty, how to escape a crib, and how to hold a fork. Damnnear grown. Your baby still needed to go play outside, be around other kids, you know what people say about you two being lonely. That year it snowed all yous parents ditched the playground, now way too frosty and icy and slick or “dangerous” and went over to one of the courts with a hill nearby, where kiddos—wrapped up in desert families’ versions of snowsuits and base layers—let em rip. A pitiful sight, desert babies in makeshift snow gear using adult gardening gloves for snow mittens, but good enough. They’d be chucking ice at each other and their gloves was flying off, they sledded on cardboard and kept tipping over, faceplanting and crying. No carrots or nothing, right, so the snowmen was just lumps of snow with dried-up palm fronds for arms and no eyes or mouth, real mysterious-like.

The little flakes of snow kept falling down like you was in a snowglobe, or a cereal bowl, right. Man. The ice on that hill was so soft and crunchy and squishy. You’d never felt anything like that, wanted to drizzle syrup all over it, lick it up like a snocone. Or pump a bubblegum bump on your tongue and stick it out, wait for the snow to fall on the flavor, on your stuck out tongue. Cept not really, because it was freezing balls out. Some of them parents you was with were drinking whisky or brandy or poor man’s hot toddy, getting louder and funnier—to themselves at least—the more they sipped. They was just like they kids in that way.

Well anywho. You was watching all this, as your baby was trying to make meatballs outta the snow in gloves too big for bitty baby fingers when you saw that little boy.

That perfect little boy.

Who’s that boy, you asked. Where’d he come from?

But no one heard you. You wasn’t asking nobody in particular, you know how you do.

And you looked around, tried to see the momma or auntie or nanna the boy belonged to, and you couldn’t find no grownup that looked half as perfect as that little boy. So you just went back to watching the boy across the way out in the falling desert snow, kinda ignoring your own baby. This boy, you couldn’t describe him, no one woulda believed you, but he got a hold over you real bad.

First of all. He was probably around the same age as your baby, but this little boy didn’t walk like your clumsy baby or none’a the other little toddler ducks in your sandy ass pond out here. This little boy seemed like he could probably make his own breakfast, pour milk from a carton, he just seemed that capable and confident. Real motor controls.

Now second of all. He had actual snow gear, all beige, perfect fit. You know babies out here don’t wear no beige right, all tie-dyes and crayola crap from the same Target or hand-me-downs from one of yous or another. Honestly, all them babies was usually running around barefoot in bathing suits with their bellies out and round, right, cause that was a trick to not have to wash no laundry, water being what it was. Not this kid though. Looked like some dry-cleaning set, something made just for him. And his hat. Oh this little boy's hat! He had a beautiful beige hat on that looked so soft, you wanted to touch it, you really did. Probably be the softest, nicest thing you’d ever touch in your whole lifetime. And you used to work at one of those patio restaurants overlooking a golf course at the private clubs over in La Quinta, where men would yell “BLOODY MARY! CART!” at you across the putting green, so you touched and seen nice shit plenty enough.

But this boy wasn’t like those club members. And his hat wasn't like no silky pashmina. No. Then this boy, as you was watching him, your mouth started drying out and teeth got cold from being open wide, he took his hat off. You never seen nobody take a hat or anything off like this boy. He did it with the most focus and intention anybody could give a hat, like he was some scientist taking the cure to cancer off the top of his head. Under his hat, the boy had this beautiful little bowl—maybe a mushroom?—haircut, showing off a head of perfect little straight shiny hair, not a strand out of place.

He was so beautiful. All yours babies was looking wind-battered and rashy-skinned and snot-faced, noses crusty and drippy at the same time, and they kept bitching about they gloves falling off and the ice being too cold to touch, and yous parents was all like, no shit sherlocks. But this boy man. Unphased by that whiny-ass noise, the cold, he was in his own world. He walked like he was made for snow in the desert, and approached a buncha the little kids holding his hat between his hands, arms down in front of him. And when one of the kids noticed him standing there all quiet, he did this graceful little bow, his hands and hat still covering his little junk. The bossy girl who always had those two lopsided piggies pushed forward towards this bowing cherub and said something spicy to him, then she turned around and they all kept building a snowman or whatever pile of ice they was making like a team.

The little boy did his tiny bow again, still pinching his fancy hat with his mitten tongs. And then the boy turned and walked away on over to a pole near the fence by the courts, crouched down and started digging. Scooping ice, man, just scooping. You think he put it inside his little hat, you wasn’t sure, until alla the sudden, oh, you was sure. You gasped when you saw he’d done filled that beautiful hat with wet snow, it looked like a heaping bag of dog poo or something now, and was probably ruined. Then, he twisted the hat closed, laid the hat down in the snow, and sat on it.

He just sat on it, like some Dr. Seuss scene.

You was watching, wondering. Staring like a freak at this boy in the snow in Palm Springs, your cheeks getting all hot and your hair dripping tiny drops off its loose, ragged ends. You could see your breath, everybody could see they breath, and the longer that little boy sat on his hat, the faster you was breathing steamy clouds out.

Your baby came up to you at least five times to get them gloves back on right, or right enough, or to tattle on someone like pigtails or who knows who, and by the last time you wasn’t even wiping the snot away or pretending to listen no more.

And then it happened. You saw the little boy stand up, and turn his back to you, the smushed cap still on the ground. And then he bent over and picked it up, and walked back to them kids he’d bowed all nice-like to. His magic, man, everyone felt it, because the bossy girl turned around, sensing him near her, and started to say something to him again.

This angelic little boy, his hair still perfect and shiny, he raised his arm—the one holding up his dripping hat—and then swung it down, chucking the hat at her, boom, right into her already red face. And the other kids got all loud, mostly laughing, and some of them started saying it smelled like piss or pee-pee. And the boy just did another one of them little bows of his and then walked away, calm and slow. Leaving the hat, the scene. He walked all the way behind us over to where a bunch of other little beige babies were; he latched himself onto their chained together leash, and then they started walking away, like they was balancing beakers of world-changing juices on their pretty little heads as they went. All of them was kinda pigeon-toed and graceful just like him. You figured they was going back wherever they came from. Some land where it snows on purpose and on schedule, where babes hold crazy still for haircuts. Maybe they’d come through a portal in one of the mountains, past the big-balled goats and confused cactuses and bougainvillea that weres struggling, shocked in this cold-ass snow.

None of yous parents or nobody said anything, honestly lots was probably glad to see someone give that bossy girl a taste of her own medicine. None of yours babies played for too much longer after that, the pee bomb making it so people had to actually do some laundry, and refill their bone dry thermoses.

You got real nervous, because you wanted to go get the hat, to maybe keep it forever. But you didn’t know what you was gonna say if anyone asked what you was doing, why you was picking up the pee hat?

But man. Seeing that little boy the year it snowed in Palm Springs? Feeling all those feelings towards some strange kid? It was the first moment anything ever made you wonder if you could actually want to be a parent, instead of just havin’ to be one.