Monday, the twenty-eighth of February, was the last day of M*A*S*H.
I don't know how to explain to anybody who wasn't alive then what that meant. It was a television show. It had been on for eleven years, longer than I'd been alive, and that night at eight-thirty Mountain time CBS was going to show the last episode, two and a half hours long, and the whole country was going to stop and watch it. That was not an exaggeration. The newspapers said so. At school nobody talked about anything else. Mrs. Trujillo let us spend the last half hour of the day writing letters to Hawkeye Pierce, and At Station 4 Hank had brought his own nineteen-inch Zenith from home, because the station set was a black-and-white Philco with a coat hanger for an antenna and he said he would not watch the end of M*A*S*H on a Philco, he would rather go to the dentist, and it was sitting on the kitchen counter with a towel over it like a cake.
It was cold that day. A front had come down the Front Range overnight, and the wind was out of the north for once, so you couldn't smell the mill, and the sky was low and white and the temperature at the bank on Northern Avenue said eleven degrees when I walked past it at three-fifteen. Every chimney on Spruce Street had a ribbon of smoke coming out of it, flat and torn, and the snow left over from the week before had gone hard and gray and squeaked under my boots.
My grandfather was in a bad mood. Mrs. Baca said so at the door, buttoning her coat. "He didn't want his lunch," she said. "He keeps looking out the window. He's been singing that cowboy song all afternoon, the one about the devil's herd. I think he knows it's cold. They always know when the weather turns."
She went home. I hung my backpack on the kitchen chair and went in to him. He was in the recliner with the afghan over his knees, and he was looking out the side window, up the alley, where there wasn't anything to see but the Martinezes' Impala on blocks and the bare elm and, past the back of the firehouse, the roofs and chimneys along Evans, and he was singing under his breath, yippie-yi-ay, yippie-yi-oh, in his thin high voice, his good hand tapping on the arm of the chair.
"Hi, Grandpa."
He looked at me and his face did the thing it did, came up and then got stuck. "Eloy," he said. "The, the. Sí." He pointed out the window with his good hand. "The. Cold."