Scenes from The Pond at Bryant Park, New York City

I travel to New York City just enough each year for the city to be directionally familiar and situationally unexpected. So that I was not expecting, on our wind-whipped day, to find Christmas shops in Bryant Park behind the public library, nor an imported rink with a snow-top finish where these skater congregated. I'd have put on a pair of skates had I been alone, for it was early in the New York day and there was room for one more glider. But I took photographs instead—spectating in this case being nearly as good.

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Almost

Yesterday in my travels I came upon this boy on ice—sweeping a hockey stick before him, training a puck. The pond ice was blue, and beneath it swam herds of orange koy, slides of sunset colors going by. I walked the circumference of the pond, then walked out onto the ice, where I could imagine myself pushing off and gaining speed. Throwing myself open to the wind, a red scarf trailing behind.

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The Blur of Childhood

Perhaps because we here on the east coast have had a bit of a cold spell lately. Perhaps because the heating system in our old house went down a few months ago (and cannot be repaired til summer, leaving us with a patchwork of space heaters, leaving me endlessly bone-chilled, cold pounded, fractured), I keep thinking about my early days on ice skating rinks.

This was after I'd taught myself to skate on Boston ponds. After I'd told my parents that I wanted nothing more than blades and ice beneath my feet, that I might die if I didn't have this, that I might not grow up to be me. After Robyn Rock, the skating sensation of the Wilmington, DE, rink, came out one day during a public skate session (this being a few months post-Boston) and taught me to waltz jump for real, to rightly spin. This was after that, when I was skating early morning, late afternoon, most every day. It's those days that I've been thinking about lately.

Days when the cold was something I sought, I craved, when I craved that music playing. I wanted to float—forever, always. I wanted to leap and never land.

There are few photographs of me as a child. There are just a handful of me on skates. I have in my possession two. It seems right that they are imprecise, blurred through.

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Ice Skating

The cold snap has me thinking of ice and blades, of first waltz jumps on frozen Boston ponds, and of the Schuylkill River, years ago, when skating clubs rose up along the banks and men pushed their ladies about on bladed chairs. (Ah, gallantry, where has it gone?)

But what does it feel like to be skated upon? I wondered about that as I wrote Flow, the river's autobiography. I thought it might go something like this:

Imagine taking a needle to the point of blood upon your palm. Imagine drawing that needle around and around, leaning in on it, forcing an edge, tearing at the creases and the lifelines, the ridges and slightest hills that forecast your happiness. Imagine the skin giving way.


That's skating.

(with thanks to The Library Company of Philadelphia for use of this iconic Boathouse Row image)

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Beginnings

For eight consecutive summers, not so long ago, I had the privilege of hanging out with young writers. Sometimes they came to my house. Sometimes we met in a garden. Sometimes we sat on someone else's porch. We'd read some of my favorite writers out loud, or imagine a room built of shadows, or work together to create a neighborhood of unforgettable characters. We'd write villanelles and pastorals and advertising lines. We'd imagine ourselves to be kites caught in trees. We'd listen to music and write to its mood.

Wherever the writers were, there was light. There was laughter. There was something that I held onto for a very long time.

When I was creating the heroine of my first novel, UNDERCOVER, I was thinking a lot about the young writers I'd met and what they'd taught me. I was thinking, too, about who I had been as a child—how much I'd loved words, and how much I also loved to ice skate. For me, language and movement will always be bound. I think of writing as an act of choreography, just as I think of ice skating as a form of storytelling.

UNDERCOVER has elements of my own life in it, therefore. But it is also inspired by the young writers working today.

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