A glimmer of perfection
It was a day of bluebird skies, a rarity in central New York, which is typically enveloped in some type of weather-pending cloud cover coming off the Great Lakes far to the west. It must have been my aunt who told me to grab my mom’s old skates and head down to the bass pond. She was reliably the best at making the most of the microclimate where we lived in the foothills of the Adirondacks. She was always skiing one kind or the other, kayaking, swimming, tubing down the creek, camping, hiking, exploring all that nature’s playground had to offer, in any weather. During the darkest days of winter, she would plan a potluck, or a game night, something to get people out and social. Today, the weather was an anomaly of perfection, and she had motivated this sulky teenager to dig out the long-unused skates from the musty cellar, and hitch a ride down the dirt road, where a line of cars was parked alongside the split rail fence that kept the cows from wandering. I hadn’t ever skated on the bass pond before. I did not possess the confidence to utilize others’ private property at will the way my aunt and father did. They had grown up here, then settled here themselves, as had many of their childhood friends, and the pastoral neighborhood of farms and old homes that had sprouted in the days when the waterfalls were a tourist destination rather than a power plant was, in their minds, still as wide open for them to access as it was when they roamed freely as kids.
I never asked how word had gotten out about the pond, how so many people knew that today was the day and now was the time. Long before text chains, mass emails, or social media, perhaps, on this day, word had spread via laborious rotary phone calls, or more likely, it was just something locals intrinsically knew, back when one looked out the window instead of consulting a device to discover the weather. It hadn’t occurred to me that others would be there, and my teenage vanity hoped I didn’t know anyone, an impossibility in this tight-knit community. I trekked across the snow-covered field, avoiding cow patties, following the broken path that had already been forged. Rain, followed by a quick drop in temperature had left a thick crust of ice coating the fluffy snow beneath, sparkling like diamonds in the sunlight. It also left the pond…perfection.
It was Rockwellian. Like a Norwegian fjord, the massive pond forged its way through steep, Spruce-covered hills on both sides, curving out of sight into shaded nooks, reemerging into sunlit view farther down. I sat on a log, straining to wedge my feet into the stiff skates. Two boys from school came to my aid and we giggled at the absurd difficulty of it. Alas, laced and ready, I pushed off from the snowy bank and glided, the ice as smooth as if it had been cultivated by machine, the air crisp and full of my clouded breath, my body searching for its center, finding a familiar rhythm borne from hours of roller skating through my house. A dozen or so neighbors crisscrossed the ice around me. The boys had brought hockey sticks and created makeshift goals from small logs. I skated toward the far end of the pond, turning back when I got nervous that the ice wasn’t as thick as it should be.
The air was crisp, my eyes squinting against the sun. Then, emerging from the throng as though an apparition, is a figure moving so elegantly, so sublimely, it’s as though the skates are an extension of him. He is grace as he glides, his frame tall and proud, though he is nearly seventy. He wears tan corduroy slacks and a heavy Scandinavian sweater. He clasps his hands behind his back and whistles quietly, as though under his breath, his disposition that of someone out for an afternoon stroll. I pause and watch the man. I know him well. His white beard is surprisingly soft when I kiss his cheek at my birthday parties. His expression is often contemplative, as though perpetually thinking of other things. When my friends have met him, they ask if he is a pirate, surely loud enough for him to hear, his black eye patch hiding the result of a skiing accident he suffered as a young man. He is my grandfather, not the one who lives with me, not the one married to my grandmother a few houses down, the other one. My dad’s father. He is complicated. Aloof. Often more interested in everyone outside of the family rather than within. A man who left most things unfinished- his doctorate, his marriage, his parenting, lured by the bottle and those who would give him adoration rather than criticism, those who would see him as he wanted to be seen rather than how he really was, a man who was far less than he could have been, whose temper and ego and insecurities left him adrift; a man who carried life’s disappointments with him in the stoop of his shoulders and the downturn of his mouth. But here in this moment, I witness his unbridled joy, his skill, a glimmer of a smile… and he, like the ice, is perfection.
