Skating and I fell in love in a vulnerable place. For me, that is. I get that it’s not reciprocal or anything. I’m not that far gone. 

How vulnerable was this place, you say? Well, back in my college years while being pummeled by depression, I also fell top-of-my-head-to-tips-of-my-toes in love with the person I thought I was going to be with forever. You know how this ends, for the in love and immature. And when we ended, the only place I felt happy for a long time was at the ice rink. 

I was absolutely nothing to write home about as a skater, you understand. When you’re a just-barely adult and say you skate, people cheerfully ask, “Are you going to the Olympics?” Or, “Triple axel?” Um, no. When you get serious at 20, think single jumps, not triple ones. But it doesn’t matter once I lace my boots up and step out there. The world fades into the background and nothing exists outside of my fellow skaters and the music and me, gliding away.

So even if the sheet of ice and the leather boots and the steel blades don’t actually love me back – I do what any person in love does. I keep showing up. Even when all signs of logic and self-preservation say maybe I shouldn’t show back up, I do. And when I think about some of those instances, where showing up was almost definitely a bad idea that could only be cooked up by a skating-drunk brain, I realized my skating has a theme. 

Not “grace” or “hope” or “perseverance”. I mean, I guess I have all those things, at least in teaspoons. But one thing my skating career has in oodles and gallons and spades is…..birds. Specifically, large, awkward fowl. They litter my skating career like feathered confetti. 

It’s not that I have sought to incorporate birds into my skating. They just keep showing up there. 

Like the time I dressed up in a sweaty matted penguin costume at a sad little Halloween party in a chiropractor’s parking lot. As a rink mascot, natch. 

Or the time I competed against a woman wearing a full-body chicken suit….and lost.

Or the one where I battled a boodle of kids over which horrible duck-themed song they would perform to. 

Why a duck song, you ask? Because there were duck outfits that had to be used, obvs!

Oh, I thought I had a way around it. When the kids rejected Rubber Ducky as “a baby song”, I was secretly relieved and thought we could go back to my original idea of trains. But the skating director was wily, and determined to use those damn duck costumes. And that’s where “Disco Duck” came into my life. 

Why yes, it does include lyrics like “get down mama, shake your tail feather! (duck laugh) Heh heh heh heh heh heh” And “try your luck, don’t be a cluck. Disco, disco duck!”

The kids were content, thinking it was “cool” (they had an average age of about 7). The skating director was thrilled that my motley little crew was going to put those matted yellow feathers and orange skate covers to good use. Everyone was happy but me, so I zipped my mouth (beak?) and set out to choreograph a disco-inspired duck number. Thankfully time has wiped my memory of the choreography. But I still haven’t lived down the ice show. 

See, we taught the group skating lessons on the rink divided up like this. 

I was hopeful that when the big day came, their performance would look like this.

But instead, it looked like this.

These kids were beginning skaters who’d never practiced our number outside our lesson-lane of the rink. They couldn’t agree on where to start the number, and having that average age of about 7, their collective un-solution was to try to shove each other into place. The shoving match went on over two whole minutes of synthesized quacking and disco beats. I wanted to disappear into the Zamboni pit. 

Strangely, I was less embarrassed a few years later, when I skated what I thought was a blue-ribbon winning performance only to have every single judge mark me below the woman in full chicken regalia. In the judges’ defense, she was impressive, as a chicken. She scratched the ice with her primordial looking chicken-costumed feet and didn’t talk while in costume, because she was, well, acting like a chicken. 

The chiropractor-Halloween-mascot thing was like a fever dream. We’d moved to a new city and I’d earnestly asked the skating director if I could “do anything”. She smelled my desperation and assigned me to dress up in the Popsicle the Penguin suit for Trunk-or-Treat. I stumbled around the mini-mall parking lot, waving hi to the same 7 kids repeatedly, until one of them wouldn’t stop mauling my wing. So then I stood around and tried to blend in. Except you can’t blend in, anywhere, ever, when you’re wearing a giant penguin costume. 

But you know one place where you can not only blend in, you can fit? Like the Cheers bar, with better costumes and less alcohol? In a skating rink, friends, if you’re an adult skater! 

I’ve gotten away from skating before. But I’m like a homing pigeon (another bird, so of course I am). When the time is right, this pigeon will find an ice rink. I found my rink in the ATL after my daughter was born and my brain fell apart . When my sweet niece died, I skated through the pain. Some of my adult skaters knew. They knew, too, when I was dropped by my employer like a pandemic hot potato. And were some of the best people about sending me job links and finding ways to say, without saying, I’m here and I believe in you. 

Doing this activity that makes absolutely no sense to do except we all love it bonds us. No matter who you are and what you have going on in your life, if I see you lacing up and heading out there to tackle an edge or a turn or a jump – I see you, I get that in you and you’re on my team. I could say it’s cause we’re just magical grownups on ice at Atlanta FSC, but I think the magic extends to all of adult skating. Or, hopefully, any activity where people are doing it for love, and recognize how lucky they & rest of the in-love activity-doing squad are. 

Your joy and your people are out there. You just need to go skate. Or, go do whatever you love to do, with the people who get it, and hopefully get you.

Somehow that time doing what you love magically regenerates the strength to cope with things you don’t. And Lord knows we all need that.

After all, there are a lot of cluster ducks out there, and most of them aren’t over in two minutes.

Photo credits: penguin by Rock Pexels, ice rink by Stock Snap, ducks on ice Thomas Wolter, skater by Manfred Richter, dancers by bigter choi, protest by Niek Verlaan , chicken by here and now unfortunately ends my journey on Pixabay. All from Pixabay

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