Prayer

One of Dan's friends, a buddy from his PeeWee travel hockey team, suffered a shoulder injury in football. In the aftermath of the injury, Dan's friend has suffered a bone infection. On Thursday, he underwent surgery for ARDS (acute respiratory distress syndrome). He was life-flighted to Omaha where he remains on life-support in the ICU. His Dad says he has improved every day, but Dan's friend is desperately ill.

I don't know how many people read this blog (I suspect it's me and one or two of my closest friends), but if you are reading this, know that there is a brave, life-loving boy struggling for breath. Please pray.

~Frankie

Speed

When you sit at the rink and watch other skaters turn or change direction on the ice, you see a constellation of skills building one on the next that impress you. Maybe you think about how quickly the skaters’ feet seem to move in a turn, how balanced they are over their centers, how graceful they make such quick movements seem. But attending every observable motion in a quick turn are a myriad of invisible and intangible body/mind moves: the quickness of breath stilled for the moment preceding the turn, the laying aside of fear and doubt, the instantaneous decision that now is the moment and the concomitant will to believe one is prepared to change direction in the blink of an eye.

To earn a Level Three badge, one of the skills I will be tested on is the two-foot turn on a circle. This skill builds on the standing two-foot turn that I learned in Level Two. For the Level Two turn, my feet, carefully held together, point toward the boards on one side of the rink. I have one arm outstretched in the same direction as my toes and the other stretched out parallel to my torso. To turn, keeping my feet close together, I torque my upper body, at the same time as I quickly swing my feet 180 degrees so that my toes point to the boards on the other side of the rink and my arms have switched positions.

On Wednesday, my teacher tells me it’s time to try a moving two-foot turn on the circle. Now I need to gather speed as I move around the inked-in face-off circle on the ice, bring my feet together in a glide, and perform the same two-foot turn in motion so that I end by gliding backwards on two feet around the circle. I’ve watched hundreds of kids perform this move both in figure skating and in hockey and admired their sureness, quickness, and grace. I’ve never imagined doing it myself. In fact, this move is one of several thousand that I’ve imagined would be impossible for me. Jenny says you can’t do it slowly or your feet will come apart, you’ll waver on your center, and you’ll fall. I don’t want to fall.

One autumn day in 1989, I stand on a firing range with my friend, Dave. He’s showing me how to shoot a gun. I feel like a character in a movie. He tells me to stand with my feet shoulder-width apart. Not too wide, he says, and nudges my feet a bit closer together. He fusses about my arms too. Two hands on the gun, arms straight, but with just a little give. He instructs me in how to aim. He tells me to pull the trigger and I do. The shot is loud and my arms jounce. He laughs and tells me to try again. This time, he says, I need to breathe in deep, relax my shoulders, let the breath out slowly and stop when I’ve released about half. Now he wants me to fire. I do. I hit the target, but wide of the bulls-eye by a large margin. We do this over and over again.

One summer day, years later, I’m bobbing in a lake, having squeezed my feet into the rubber boots of two skis. I’m holding onto the bar of a ski rope. The line of the rope goes between my skis to the back of the boat that rocks ahead of me. My knees are bent almost up to my chest and I’m imagining pushing down with my heels, but letting the boat pull me to standing. The waves of leftover wake from the boat are tilting me this way and that so I struggle to keep the tips of my skis above the surface of the lake. I want to wait until the surface of the lake is still, but the occupants of the boat are looking back at me, waiting for me to shout, “Hit it.” So I do. I land face-first in the water. The boat circles to bring me the rope. I reach for it, wrangle it between my skis, pull my knees to my chest, and the water rocks me. The water won’t be still. I have to decide, I think, that I can do this. I put my doubt, alongside my frustration at the way the water rocks me, in parentheses. I turn myself over to the power of the boat and the sluicing of the waves and yell, “Hit it.”

It’s 1979. I’m standing on a beam of the Toby Bridge where it crosses over the Clarion River, outside the railing that prevents cars from slipping off the pavement and into the green water below. None of my friends have made the leap, the patently illegal and transgressive leap. I want to be the first. I want to land feet first and slice into the water so that I don’t slap my belly or back or hit my head on the water or the bridge pilings. Every moment I spend thinking about the jump increases the likelihood that someone else will jump first. I feel the nagging tickle of adrenaline at my core. I decide and go. Just like that. I just do it in the blink of an eye.

On the ice, I gather speed around the circle. I’m scared and I can feel the fear less as an abstraction than as a physical sense of dread pulsing in my muscles, blood, and breath. My left arm is outstretched ahead of me, over my toes. My right arm reaches toward the center of the circle. I pull my feet together and try a glide. I stroke some more around the circle, gather speed again. I see Grace glance at me from the other end of the ice. I get up some more speed, take a breath, release it halfway then hold it. I feel the wobble over my blades and imagine, quick as lightening, what it will feel like to be gliding backwards. I decide and rip my blades around, willing my feet to stay together, while I wrench my torso in the opposite direction, switching arms as I go. Now I’m facing the opposite direction, still on my feet, and slowing to a stop. I breathe again.

In the afterward of this lesson, I think about limits. I think about the ways I seem always to be looking for the outside edge of myself -- and for the knife-thin slice of opening in the membrane that separates self from world and from others as if I might slip through. I think about the ways in which I am both repelled by the possibility of the end of self and simultaneously and nearly inexorably drawn to it. I think about the impossibility of realizing that possibility or of knowing, assuming that one could achieve it, what slipping through would feel like. I can only know that feeling as an approximation: this is what it might feel like, and never this is what it is. And as I think about limits, I think about the strange matter of fact that skating (and shooting and skiing and leaping off bridges) and writing seem all to be expressions of this terrible fascination I have with the limit, with the arts of the impossible, with speeding toward oblivion in the absurd, but lovely faith that I will find life there.

Another Postcard from the Rink

Last week two other Moms joined me on the ice for Learn to Skate. Watch out kids! Because if we fall on you, you will be smushed! I worked on backwards swizzles and stroking and backward one-foot glides. I have to be able to glide a length of ice equal to twice my height. This is not the first time in my life I've regretted being 5'10. If I were 4'8 I'd have passed Level Three already. Sigh. I also learned the beginnings of a two-footed spin. I think I'm going to like spinning, although I wasn't turning very fast and still got that dizzy feeling in my tummy. At the end of class, Grace skated over and gave me some tips so that I was able to work in a few more turns at a just-slightly higher rate of speed.

I ordered a new point and shoot digital camera and I'm hoping it arrives before Wednesday night so I can try it out along with my Flip Ultra (BUY ONE OF THESE -- they are great!).

I'm working up a longer post, but didn't want to let the Blog go for too long without saying anything. I'll give you a hint: the new post is about limit-experiences and learning. Enough said.

More coming soon...

Changing

Last evening, I watched Grace skate for about an hour before her lesson with Roxanne. She's been learning more about jumping since her competition in Kansas City and last night she was working on loops and flips. Now some of the back-story of what I'm about to write is that after the KC competition, Grace decided she didn't want to focus on competitions. In short, though it's a more complicated tale than this, Grace doesn't like coming in second (or third). She likes to place first. When we talked with Roxanne about competing and what distinguishes a first place performance from a second or third place performance, here's what Roxanne said (as I understood her).

Thing One: You don't have any control over what other skaters do and how they do. Some skaters stay at the same level and compete at the same level for months and months. That means you may be skating a brand new program at a new and higher level than you have skated at before while another skater is skating her program for the fourth time at the same level. Your job is to skate as well as you can, to push your own limits, and to skate for the joy of skating.

Thing Two: You don't have control over what the judges choose to notice and reward. However, generally speaking, aggressive skaters do better than passive skaters. Skaters who jump higher, who spin faster and who achieve more turns per spin, who claim the ice with speed and grace are rewarded more highly for the same skills performed less aggressively.

Thing Three: Skaters need to learn how to feel and perform their music. Competing isn't just about completing each required element. Judges are looking at the performance as a whole as well. And that means they are looking at and judging how one takes the ice, the stretch of arms and legs, the point of toes, the arc of neck and arch of back, rhythm and pacing...not as isolated elements, but in a holistic sense for the ways in which, taken together, these aspects of performance are expressive of a point of view and tell a story that draws an audience in and holds them rapt if only for a few minutes.

Last week, Grace got into trouble at school for not paying attention and for not working very much. On Thursday evening, she and I lay together on my bed talking about what had happened. I told her a story about a time in fifth grade when I didn't try very hard and what the consequences of that failure had been for me. Grace was quiet for a bit and then she said, "Mommy, sometimes I don't have to try very hard to do okay. I can get by. But I do get bored sometimes." So we talked some more, both about figure skating and about school. And we agreed that maybe doing "okay" isn't really good enough for Grace. This is true for me a well and it's one of the pieces of common ground between me and my youngest daughter. Both of us are driven by passions we can barely name. When either one of us is striving for "okay," we get bored and often fail. And both of us respond similarly to failure. When we choose boredom (and it is a choice, I think) we are inclined to turn away from the work rather than leaning into it. And as we talked, I think we both agreed that while there's great risk in the spaces beyond "okay," it is in those spaces that our greatest joys are experienced along with the fulfillment of our passions. And this is true for both of us even when we fail after having risked much.

There are times for both Grace and I as learners when we are required by circumstance or by our teachers, coaches, or mentors to spend time learning things we find, shall I say, not-very-compelling. There are plenty of times when we feel that we are being pressed into rote learning in service of more interesting, exciting learning that may or may not come to us later on. And both Grace and I want to skip right to the good parts (and to the rewards that come from the good parts that never, we know, come from the boring old rote stuff).

There isn't, I find, a tidy ending to these sorts of conversations, either for parents or children, for teachers or students. One sees, instead, the conversation emerging as strands of new experience, new or renewed efforts, or as revisions of self-expressed-in-action.

I stood watching Grace last night, I thought I saw a luminous silver thread weaving through Grace's presence, pleasure, and labor, drawing in and holding close her dreams and desires to her performance of self and skater on the ice. I am not thinking here so much of a perfectly completed moment in her learning life, but a learning-in-action moment in which one can sense in the periphery of perception, the prior conversations ongoing in Grace's mind. Perhaps you can see it too?

Postcards from the Rink

Wednesday was my first day of skating class. Grace got herself ready to go onto the ice while I paced around, talked with folks, signed kids in for Junior Club (a class for more advanced skaters). I watched Grace work with Roxanne and practice on her own, then I watched her skate with her Junior Club class. Somehow, watching her helped me relax a bit and as I calmed down I decided to give myself permission, again, to just have fun.

Learning to Skate

Finally, it was time for the Learn to Skate kids (and adults) to take the ice. Jerry, one of my favorite Blade and Edge coaches, worked with me. I learned about the center of gravity on figure skate blades and discovered how different figure skate blades are from hockey skates.

Hockey skates rock you forward on the blades so that your center of gravity is closer to the ball of your foot. There's a kind of built-in forward momentum, I think, in a hockey blade. Figure skates place your center of gravity further back on the blade, closer to your heel. Hence, you might notice when you watch good skaters (not me), that they stand upright and kind of stretched between ice and sky.

I wobbled and bobbled around for quite a while. But then Jerry started to talk about feeling your center or core and the way every motion begins there. And he started to describe the way that, as you move, you gather strength in your center, push down, and bend your knees so that the ice softens beneath you. That image made sense to me. And it sounded a lot (and reminded my body) of all those years spent in dance and movement classes.

I tried forward swizzles (your heels are together, you gather your center, bend your knees and stretch your feet out and around in a forward motion till your toes come together again. And I tried backward swizzles (your toes are together, you gather your center, bend your knees and stretch your feet out going backwards until your heels touch again). If you go one-forward-one-back, that's a "rocking horse" and if you keep going forward or backward, then you're doing actual swizzles. I learned one foot glides and some stroking. I worked on snowplow stops and a standing turn in which you torque your upper body at the same time as you rotate your feet in a half turn. Scary, but cool.

Jerry is a great teacher and he was really encouraging. At one point he told me that he thinks he has learned so much about coaching from working with adult skaters. He said that adult skaters are never ambivalent about being on the ice. They ask good questions and they're excited to learn. At the end of my half-hour with Jerry he said, "Now you know why we get addicted to this sport!" And he was right; I did know and this time from a skater's perspective. It's fun and not because it's easy. Figure skating is challenging. You learn the skills in small enough chunks to be successful quickly, at least in the beginning. But you know, even as you're learning, that you are capable of making those movements more solidly, more fluidly, with greater balance and beauty. And, in watching other skaters, you can see how this small movement you're learning in this moment will become a part of some much more elaborate and complex movement later.

Whoo Hoo

So, at the end of the lesson I came off the ice and my friend Rhonda handed me my first two badges. Somehow, I managed to pass two levels on my first night. Whoo Hoo!

Proof

In case you couldn't see them in that last picture, here are my first two badges!

Heresy

I have a confession to make. When it comes to football, I play Loose End. I don't get football. And in Husker territory, to admit this is to commit heresy.

Dan and Lucy will be playing their second games of the season today. Both of them are excited. Each of them will be running the ball. Don't ask me what positions they're playing because I can't keep the positions in football straight in my head. Tight End, Full Back, Half Back. What's up with that? Run around, knock people down. Whistle blows. Stand around for twenty minutes. Line up. Run around and knock people down some more. Fascinating.

I feel like I should go watch and cheer my kids on. But the truth is that I'd rather poke my own intestines with a pickle fork than stand around in the rain watching football no matter who is playing. Give me a rink and a hot cup of coffee. Give me a game with forward and defensive lines: a game that's easy to understand. Give me a game where size is good, but speed and skill are all: a game in which the skills required to play are complex. Give me a game that moves.

About the possibility of learning more about football, I feel much as I felt about algebra and French in high school: I prefer not to, as Bartleby the Scrivenor would have said. Now life has given me the assignment. A good parent would learn this even if she doesn't want to. I want to be a good parent, but I HATE FOOTBALL.

Years ago, when I was in graduate school, I dreaded the day when I have would have to take the course that would satisfy the language requirement. Without that course, I'd have no PhD and would have wasted hope, desire, years, and thousands of dollars. I waited and worried until everything else was finished. Finally, I just had to take that course or pack myself in and live with failure. So I enrolled in a French class for graduate students. I was very very pregnant (this seems to be a running theme in my life) and I had to squeeze into the seat. When the baby kicked I worried about it breaking a foot on the desk that pressed into my tummy. I took copious notes; I highlighted every line in the textbook; I made flashcards and carried them with me everywhere. I got a D on the first quiz and further humiliated myself by weeping in class.

I hate failure. So, I made myself keep going. I made more flashcards. I checked out books by Foucault still in their original French and practiced translating. I underlined what I had highlighted in the textbook. I'm not sure how, but I did ultimately pass the course and even did well in it if the grade at the end of the semester suggests success. The larger success was that I learned that I can learn, even when I don't really want to, if I set my mind to it. I haven't used French since taking the course and the truth is that I've forgotten almost all of what I learned.

Except this: when I most dread learning and ask myself why, the answer that returns to me is that I am afraid I can't. I may tell myself I don't like the one who teaches or I may tell myself the subject is boring, but the cold hard reality is fear. I'm afraid of failing.

I think Lucy might be the only girl in Lincoln playing football. She isn't just the only girl on her team. I haven't seen another girl playing on any team. She is the only one so far as I can tell. It took her coaches a couple of weeks to figure out that she is a girl. I don't think Lucy worries about failure too much. She wants to learn football. She wants to play. So she marches up to the practice fields three or four times a week and runs drills and knocks people over and gets knocked over. And she gets back up. What is it, I wonder, that Lucy will learn from me if I refuse to learn football? Will she get somehow that football really is a boy's game after all because even her own mother finds it too hard to grasp? Will she learn that some things are beyond her girl body to learn and she shouldn't even try?

No, I think I have to suck it up and learn a bit about football. I may never use that knowledge again after this season (or after the kids give up the game, which I secretly hope they will sooner rather than later). But for this autumn in addition to learning to skate, which I want to do, I have to learn enough about football to not be a Loose End.

Gracie works on her Sit Spin

Analogies: Skating and Writing

I am standing, nose pressed against the glass, in the observation area of the ice rink at Tranquility Park in Omaha. Thankfully, the room is heated for this is the coldest rink in Nebraska, I think. I am watching Grace and her coach work together. Grace is practicing stroking around the outside perimeter of the rink. Roxanne is leaning against the boards watching. Grace pushes with one leg, then the other. After each stroke, she lifts her power leg and stretches it, long and with pointed toe, behind her for the glide. Her chest bobs as she goes. She stops by Roxanne when she has completed her circuit of the rink and gives the coach a big hug. Roxanne smiles, ruffles Grace’s hair, and I see her place one hand on Grace’s chest and the other on Grace’s back as she talks. Then she mimics the bobbing motion Grace was making during her first circuit. They laugh together.

Grace begins a second circuit, stroking carefully, her head high and arms outstretched. She still bobs a bit, but not as much.

And so it goes. Hour after hour, day after day. Grace and Roxanne work together on what might appear to be minutia, but are, in fact, essential elements of both the athleticism and artistry of skating. Painstakingly, Grace learns a complex grammar of the body that demands memory and understanding, the ability to calculate angle and speed, to draw apparently discrete and complex skills into a seamless composition, and the willingness to risk testing the limits of ability and genre – to press against prior conceptions of the possible and the lovely.

As I watch and as I put the word, “grammar,” to the work Grace and her coach are doing together, I realize that I have invoked a more expansive notion of grammar than one typically might as a writer, a teacher, a writing center consultant or director. I mean here to invoke “grammar” as the principles or rules attending an “art, science, or technique” and yet even this articulation is made inadequate by its conjunction: OR. (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grammar) For the grammar of skating like the grammar of writing is composed of principles informing the technique AND science AND art of the practice or craft. And these apparently constituent aspects of both skating and writing cannot be pulled apart from one another for the purpose of learning, then stuck back together again for the purpose of doing without some critical loss. To learn, for example, the principles attending the technique of a scratch spin is not to learn only the physical how, but to learn also and simultaneously the art of making such a move beautiful to spectators who have a conception of what beauty might mean in this context (the rules governing what will be accounted as beautiful), but who hope also to be surprised by a beauty conceived anew and extended – a beauty heretofore unknown and therefore breathtaking in that it changes the rules, the principles, the very definition of both the skill and the art.

The stroking that is the focus of Grace’s lesson with Roxanne this day will have its moment as a thread in the elaborate composition of a performance at some future time. This kind of stroking becomes the opening rhetorical move in a skating program: skaters use it first when they take the stage prior to the start of their music. The stroking is the projection of the skater’s presence on the ice. As an epideictic move, this stroking suggests the ceremonial quality of the occasion. This stroking is also an expression and demonstration of the ethos of the skater and of her performance: it communicates not only the skill and confidence of the skater, but the ease and grace with which she claims the right to speak, as it were, the right to perform this program at this moment before this audience.

Maybe, I think as I watch my daughter and her coach, traditional instruction in grammar and its alternative, the teaching of grammar in context (a practice so highly regarded as to have become axiomatic in writing centers) share a kind of impoverishment. Both approaches divorce the principles or rules governing usage from the art of writing, from the practice of producing not only grammatically correct text in a prescriptive sense, but also from the practice of producing writing that a reader might find beautiful where what constitutes beauty is simultaneously delimited and unfettered by genre and context. Neither approach accounts for the readiness for and delight of readers when by art one redefines convention.

Learning to Skate (Trepidation)

Sometimes the idea of me learning to skate strikes me as being absurd. Here's one truth: I am 46 years old. Isn't there at least the possibility that I am just too old for this sort of shenanigans? Of course, I learned to water ski in my thirties and then the idea of being pulled behind a boat going 30 miles an hour seemed absurd too. Perhaps what I'm seeking for is one last opportunity to feel my body doing something beautiful...which of course begs the question of whether or not I will ever get to the point where my body is capable of pulling off beauty while balancing on ice wearing cute white boots set onto two very thin blades with toe picks conspiring to land me face-first, bruised, and humiliated in front of 60 jeering children who seem never to fall of if they do fall to bounce back up off the ice like rubber balls.

Thirteen years ago, when I was pregnant with Dan, Mike and I went skating together for the first time. I worked my way around the outside perimeter of the rink. To say I went slowly and carefully is to understate the matter. I was, after all, hauling around a very large belly filled with baby. Mike, on the other hand, skated with a speed and grace that was breathtaking. I thought as I watched him that joy was written not only on his face, but radiating from his center, from the movement and speed of body through space and time too. I was witnessing not only that moment, but also a childhood full of winters marked by the lacing of skates, the first step onto the ice, the claiming of strokes and glides, the clash of hockey sticks, the laughter of brothers and sisters and cousins, the cheering of parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles. This was a body overtaken by joy.

I thought then that our children should have that feeling, that learning to skate should be an integral part of their lives, and that skating might be, should be as integral to our lives as it had been in Mike's life before he and I had ever met. Skating seemed a joy too great, too precious to abandon in service of the claims of everyday life on our time.

Since then I've spent hour upon hour upon hour in ice rinks watching Mike, Dan, Lucy and Grace skate. I've plunked my rear down on the bleachers of rinks in New York, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, and Kansas. I have been the observer, the cheerleader, the advocate, the wannabe referee, the nervous parent (you'd be nervous too if you were watching your firstborn working the goal and getting pucks fired at him with alarming speed and increasingly good aim or, while playing defense, getting taken out on the boards by some overgrown monster of a child whose parents are sitting next to you screaming, "hit him! Hit him hard!"). I've watched Lucy out-skate boys her age and older after having listened in the locker room to Dads telling their sons not to act like girls. I've watched Grace work hour after hour after hour on a scratch spin that seemed eternally illusive and then master it, magically, in an evening. I'm good at watching. I'm not sure that I'll ever be good at skating.

This morning as I woke my Mom and got her ready for the day we listened to a program about Willa Cather. Here's something Cather said near the end of her life: "The end is nothing; the road is all." I'm guessing that she intended to speak of life, itself. But in these words I hear also an extraordinary insight about learning. The point of learning to skate, for me at least, may not be to say at some end-point, "I know how to skate." but to live more fully in the verb, in the trying, the failing, the laughing, the pleasuring that attends learning. To accomplish skill or beauty would be nice, I guess. But to be a body learning might be all.