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.