Learning to Skate

By Andrea Scarpino

Los Angeles

I figure skated when I was younger, and spent many hours dreaming of the Olympics, planning routines in my head to music on the radio, imagining elaborate costumes. My favorite thing to do on the ice was spin, and when I spun, I could feel the world move away from me. I pulled my hands to my chest and forgot everyone around me. I felt free for those moments on the ice, like the world outside didn’t matter nearly as much as the world pulled close to my chest.

This past weekend, I taught my niece how to ice skate at Santa Monica’s outside winter rink. Even though I haven’t been on the ice in more than ten years, after a glide or two, I felt my weight shift under me and that old feeling of freedom come back again. I reminded myself how to spin, how to skate backwards, and tried out the little jumps I used to know so well. I felt fluid. I felt like I was dancing.

But what surprised me most wasn’t how easily I slipped back into that love of skating, but the teaching approach I took with my niece. She’s only five, and wanted to hold on to the railings along the side of the rink. A lot of kids were pulling themselves along the railing, but they weren’t really skating; their feet were moving in strange directions and they weren’t learning to balance themselves on the skate blade.

I made my niece hold my hand instead. She didn’t like this approach at first, and wasn’t eager to leave the safety of the wall. I felt myself becoming annoyed. I’m not taking you around if you don’t let go of the wall, I said. She looked worried, and at first preferred to stay put rather than skate with me. I tried to figure why it mattered to me that she actually learned to skate if she was having a perfectly good time on her own along the wall. Eventually, she let me take one hand and let Zac take the other so we could lead her around the rink. Then she let just one person hold her hand as she skated. And finally, she let go of our hands entirely. She skated all by herself, with no help from anyone. As we passed a child who got on the ice when we did and who was still pulling herself along the wall, my niece pointed and said, The wall is bad. And that was almost the best part of the evening.

I realized in that moment that what I most learned from figure skating was my body’s fluidity and ability to adjust, to center myself among the chaos of the world. That falling makes us better, failing makes us work harder. That the risk of participating is more rewarding than the safety of the sidelines. I wanted to teach my niece to skate, but I also wanted to teach her to trust in her own ability to succeed. To push away from the world’s confines and be entirely free for a while. To experience fluidity, movement, the body gliding forward without anything slowing it down. Even if she never skates again, my niece will still have that memory of leaving the wall behind, of pushing herself away from the safety of the wall and finding success one glide at a time.

Andrea Scarpino is the west coast Bureau Chief of POTB. You can visit her at:

www.andreascarpino.com

Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University View all posts by stevekuusisto