Two boys, on their way with other friends to a game of pick-up soccer, fell through a frozen pond yesterday. One, an eleven-year-old, is dead. The other, fifteen, is fighting for his life at Sick Children's Hospital.

Both boys, after ignoring the warnings of their friends, stepped onto the pond and started skipping stones across the icy surface. The elder boy, heavier, fell in first. The younger tried to pull him out, only to fall in himself.

This is very sad. It's always sad when people, and especially children, die needlessly and without purpose. But this is not tragic.

The kid was fifteen years old. He should've known WAYWAY fucking better than to walk across a pond in December -- or for that matter, at any point during the winter season, despite whatever appearances. That was not tragedy. It was sheer stupidity.

Four Toronto officers and one civilian were involved in the first rescue attempt, but nearly drowned when ice split beneath all of them. One officer tried swimming, diving and resurfacing several times, screaming each time because the water was so cold. When the firefighters arrived, nearly an hour passed before they were able to pull the boys out.

It annoys me that one of the distraught onlookers was saying, confused, "Things like this always seem to happen around Christmastime." The question was unsaid but implied: Why? Because water freezes around Christmastime. That's when kids think they can just skate across it like Our Lord Jesus Christ, and then, to their eternal, wrenchingly painful surprise, they fall in.

Today it was so warm that it rained. The city was bathed in water, and so were her people. The same agent that had killed a boy -- and might have killed any number of grown men -- was clinging like quicksilver to women's lashes, and carelessly shaken off men's wet shoulders, like a starry spray.

The sidewalks, frozen white over the weekend, turned shiny and slick, but I saw no one slip.