Every New Year, I promise myself that I will increase my level of exercise, with varying degrees of success. Towards the end of 2011, I was looking at the community recreation calendar to see what might fit into my schedule. Committing to a regular weeknight is tricky given my schedule of meetings- one week I'm busy on a Tuesday, another on a Wednesday, and then there's choir practice every Thursday.
That's why noon hour adult recreational skating lessons caught my eye. I took two years of figure skating after we moved to Canada when I was a child. It was not a happy two years, expecially for my poor feet which did not take kindly to those gleaming white insturments of podiatral torture known as girls' figure skates.
This time, however, I invested in some of the newer, 'relaxed fit' recreational skates, and signed up. The skill level of the class is pretty varied. There are some who have been taking lessons for a year or more who can skate backwards and cross their feet over with their eyes closed while whistling the Hallelujah chorus. I am not one of these. In fact, I am towards the very bottom of the group, although I am improving...slightly.
The most intriguing and intrepid member of the group however is a woman well into her 70s. She is what you would call an absolute beginner. She emigrated to Canada decades ago, and though all her kids were signed up for skating she herself never learned. Given this belated start, during her first couple of weeks of lessons she could barely move herself around the ice. Her motion was more akin to ice limping than skating. While the rest of us are now working on specific skills- stopping, gliding on one foot, tracing edges, turning around, she just keeps working on going around and around the ice, doggedly trying to improve her balance and fluidity. And slowly but surely, as the weeks progress, so does she. I know she is really afraid of falling- she's told me so, and I don't blame her. The spectre of a broken hip must be ever before her.
But she also told me the reason she is taking the lessons, the reason she is working so hard week after week, just to get a down a decent 'push and glide' form. "I just want to be able to skate with my grandchildren." She says simply. My helmet is off to this courageous grandma, and I hope the younger generations appreciate her efforts.
We hear all the time about how hockey is an integral part of Canadian identity. There are multiple reasons why I'm not sure I embrace that notion, most of them having to do with violence and a seeming indifference to the risks of brain damage and paralysis that comes with it.
But I would agree that anyone who wants to understand and expereince something of what it means to be Canadian could do a lot worse than to lace up a pair of skates and spend an few hour-long sessions in a cold arena, (or outdoors) working your leg muscles, improving your balance, overcoming your fear of falling, breathing in lungfulls of frosty air, and every once in a while feeling that wonderful uplifting sense of freedom that comes from gliding smoothly across a great white frozen surface. With or without grandchildren.
No comments:
Post a Comment