Skate Life Quotes

Party lights hang over the street, yellow and red and green. Sadie stumbles over someone’s chair, but I’m ready for this and I catch her easily by the arm. “Sorry, clumsy,” she says. “You always were, Sadie. One of your more endearing traits.” Before she can ask about that I slip my arm around her waist. She slips hers around mine, still looking up at me. The lights skate across her cheeks and shine in her eyes. We clasp hands, fingers folding together naturally, and for me the years fall away like a coat that’s too heavy and too tight. In that moment, I hope on thing above all others: that she was not too busy to find at least one good man … She speaks in a voice almost too low to be heard over the music. But I hear her – I always did. “Who are you, George?” “Someone you knew in another life, honey.

Champions never sleep, the eternal spirit keep them alert and awake.

I had a cousin who neurotically made playlists for every walking moment of her life, and that slightly obsessive habit had rubbed off on me,

Sometimes in life confusion tends to arise and only dialogue of dance seems to make sense.

Dance less in motion and more in spirit; awaken the dreamer within.

Caution not spirit, let it roam wild; for in that natural state dance embraces divine frequency.

If movements were a spark every dancer would desire to light up in flames.

I felt I was drawing close to that age, that place in life, where you realize one day what you'd told yourself was a Zen detachment turns out to be naked fear. You'd had one serious love relationship in your life and it had ended in tragedy, and the tragedy had broken something inside you. But instead of trying to repair the broken place, or at least really stop and look at it, you skated and joked. You had friends, you were a decent citizen. You hurt no one. And your life was somehow just about half of what it could be.

Dance as the narration of a magical story; that recites on lips, illuminates imaginations and embraces the most sacred depths of souls.

Show me a person who found love in his life and did not celebrate it with a dance.

Dance is the timeless interpretation of life.

If spirit is the seed, dance is the water of its evolution.

Life is an affair of mystery; shared with companions of music, dance and poetry.

If you opened the dictionary and searched for the meaning of a Goddess, you would find the reflection of a dancing lady.

I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.

Don't breathe to survive; dance and feel alive.

Music does not need language of words for it has movements of dance to do its translation.

Through synergy of intellect, artistry and grace came into existence the blessing of a dancer.

It is not over. Champions extend their limits and make things happen.

Dance to inspire, dance to freedom, life is about experiences so dance and let yourself become free.

You said that life's just like skating; I just need to kick forward and take a chance, push off the ground and follow through. And when everything works out, I'll coast.

DANCE – Defeat All Negativity (via) Creative Expression.

Dance resides within us all. Some find it when joy conquers sorrow, others express it through celebration of movements; and then there are those... whose existence is dance,

Soar like an eagle beyond skies of heavens reach; as wings of dreams dance with winds of reality.

She who is a dancer can only sway the silk of her hair like the summer breeze.

It's only life. We all get through it. Not all of us complete the journey in the same condition. Along the way, some lose their legs or eyes in acidents or altercations, while others skate through the years with nothing worse to worry about than an occassional bad-hair day. I still possessed both legs and both eyes, and even my hair looked all right when I rose that Wednesday morning in late January. If I returned to bed sixteen hours later, having lost all my hair but nothing else, I would consider the day a triumph. Even minus a few teeth, I'd call it a triumph.

Dance is the ritual of immortality.

When the melody plays, footsteps move, heart sings and spirit begin to dance.

One step, two steps, three steps; like winds of time experience joy of centuries, when movements become revelations of the dance of destinies.

What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone else’s orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away. Part of what you enjoy in a documentary technique is the sense of banditry. To loot someone else’s life or sentences and make off with a point of view, which is called “objective” because you can make anything into an object by treating it this way, is exciting and dangerous.

It didn’t matter that we were pretending, because the honest-to-God truth was that I was on the best date I’d ever had in my entire life. I was so screwed.

I think sometimes the stories we need are the ones about taking the hobbits to Isengard and dog-human dudes with space heelies and trashy King Arthurs and gay ice-skating animes and Zuko redemption arcs and space princesses with found families and galaxies far, far away. We need those stories, too. Stories that tell us that we can be bold and brash and make mistakes and still come out better on the other side.

I don’t really care about your love life, but if you’re going to date, I want it to be someone like Alec, who looks at you like he knows how lucky he is.

Live or die, but don't poison everything... Well, death's been here for a long time -- it has a hell of a lot to do with hell and suspicion of the eye and the religious objects and how I mourned them when they were made obscene by my dwarf-heart's doodle. The chief ingredient is mutilation. And mud, day after day, mud like a ritual, and the baby on the platter, cooked but still human, cooked also with little maggots, sewn onto it maybe by somebody's mother, the damn bitch! Even so, I kept right on going on, a sort of human statement, lugging myself as if I were a sawed-off body in the trunk, the steamer trunk. This became perjury of the soul. It became an outright lie and even though I dressed the body it was still naked, still killed. It was caught in the first place at birth, like a fish. But I play it, dressed it up, dressed it up like somebody's doll. Is life something you play? And all the time wanting to get rid of it? And further, everyone yelling at you to shut up. And no wonder! People don't like to be told that you're sick and then be forced to watch you come down with the hammer. Today life opened inside me like an egg and there inside after considerable digging I found the answer. What a bargain! There was the sun, her yolk moving feverishly, tumbling her prize -- and you realize she does this daily! I'd known she was a purifier but I hadn't thought she was solid, hadn't known she was an answer. God! It's a dream, lovers sprouting in the yard like celery stalks and better, a husband straight as a redwood, two daughters, two sea urchings, picking roses off my hackles. If I'm on fire they dance around it and cook marshmallows. And if I'm ice they simply skate on me in little ballet costumes. Here, all along, thinking I was a killer, anointing myself daily with my little poisons. But no. I'm an empress. I wear an apron. My typewriter writes. It didn't break the way it warned. Even crazy, I'm as nice as a chocolate bar. Even with the witches' gymnastics they trust my incalculable city, my corruptible bed. O dearest three, I make a soft reply. The witch comes on and you paint her pink. I come with kisses in my hood and the sun, the smart one, rolling in my arms. So I say Live and turn my shadow three times round to feed our puppies as they come, the eight Dalmatians we didn't drown, despite the warnings: The abort! The destroy! Despite the pails of water that waited, to drown them, to pull them down like stones, they came, each one headfirst, blowing bubbles the color of cataract-blue and fumbling for the tiny tits. Just last week, eight Dalmatians, 3/4 of a lb., lined up like cord wood each like a birch tree. I promise to love more if they come, because in spite of cruelty and the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens, I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann. The poison just didn't take. So I won't hang around in my hospital shift, repeating The Black Mass and all of it. I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.

As long as you're better at it than skating...," Anna said and stood up too. She wanted to say more, but that wasn't possible because he was kissing her. Reasonable Anna wanted to draw back the danger of touch. But unreasonable Anna welcomed the kiss like happiness. Maybe, she thought, it's better to take these moments when you get them - there might not be too many in life.

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters; how well, they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate on them well,” wrote Emerson. Is it true? If so, who can bear to believe it?

Dance is that delicacy of life radiating every particle of our existence with happiness.

Burdened no more is soul for whom life flows through dance and not breath.

Skateboarding has taught me two things - that symbolise a meaning of life. How to keep a balance and how to pick yourself up when you've fallen.

It kind of made me feel like she thought I was a broken weirdo who need an intervention before my entire life was ruined.

But the laughter was like a water bug on a pond, skating across the surface of his mind. He was amused and he laughed, but nothing was deeply funny; life was simply stupid most of the time.

The woman is not just a pleasure, nor even a problem. She is a meniscus that allows the absolute to have a shape, that lets him skate however briefly on the mystery, her presence luminous on the ordinary and the grand. Like the odor at night in Pittsburgh’s empty streets after summer rain on maples and sycamore.

I had a cousin who neurotically made playlists for every waking moment of her life, and that slightly obsessive habit had rubbed off on me to the point that I couldn’t deal with the harshness of reality anymore unless I rolled it around in music first.

Hearts shall dance once again; when canvas of ice is painted with the brush of skates.

Transcend the terrestrial; surpass the celestial, from nature’s hands when you receive the sublime pleasures of dance.

Because I’d lived most of my life in an isolated little trio of three

Allure goes beyond appearances to the way they grace the world. Some women propel themselves by means of an internal gyroscope. Others glide through life as if on ice skates. Some women convey their tortured lives through their eyes; others encircle you in the music of their laughter.

She was a strange, unsettled planet that had had once sustained life. She was a language that I had thought I almost understood even though I couldn't speak it. She hadn't always been this way. She used to wear high knee socks and short shorts and tube tops, and travel everywhere on roller skates.

I’m not the kind of girl who spends hours getting ready. I don’t blow dry my hair. And I hate make up. I’m not pretty. And I don’t want to be. I am passionate and restless and wild. I’m exhausted by prudent ideologies. I’m not inferior because of my lack of convention. I’m as strong as I am broken. I’m tired of having my sexuality mistaken for an invitation. I will sweat and I will run. I will let the rain come down on me. I want to feel life as I am. I don’t want to skate through having my immoderation controlled by weak judgements. By fear. I don’t want to be who I’m supposed to be, I want to be who I am.

He wagged his finger in my face. "You're not SUPPOSED to do anything. YOU'RE the one trying to change ME. Remember? As far as I'M concerned, YOU can do anything you want." "Except criticize you." "Hey," he said, "if that's how you want to spend your life, getting on my case"--he threw out his arms--"be my guest." He turned his deep blue eyes on me. "And anyway--" He let it hang there. He was smirking. Suddenly I felt as if I were on roller skates. "What?" "I know why you're doing it." I stopped. He walked on. "Doing what?" I said. "What? Why?" I think I was babbling. He flipped his answer as blithely as a candy wrapper over his shoulder: "You know.

World seems like a void of silence every time footsteps are deprived of dancing shoes.

When a dancer performs, melody transforms into a carriage, expressions turn into fuel and spirit experiences a journey to a world where passion attains fulfillment.

Make dance the mission every moment seeks to accomplish.

We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them.

It seemed to me that life was a giant ice skating rink, and I was the only one who didn’t have skates. Most people fear death. I don’t. I’m only afraid of not living. I don’t want to be the one behind the ice rink fence, watching other people having fun.

No, you don't write about love for the very same reason you refuse to learn to roller skate. You dislike the idea of introducing anything that requires hurting yourself repeatedly before you get good at it.

Every time you come to the limit of what is demanded of you, you are faced with the same problem - to be yourself! And with the first step you make in this direction you realize that there is neither plus nor minus; you throw the skates away and swim. There is no suffering any more because there is nothing which can threaten your security. And there is no desire to be of help to others even, because why rob them of a privilege which must be earned? Life stretches out from moment to moment in stupendous infinitude. Nothing can be more real than what you suppose it to be. Whatever you think the cosmos to be it is and it could not possibly be anything else as long as you are you and I am I. You live in the fruits of your action and your action is the harvest of your thought. Thought and action are one, because swimming you are in it and of it, and it is everything you desire it to be, no more, no less. Every stroke counts for eternity. The heating and cooling system is one system, and Cancer is separated from Capricorn only by an imaginary line. You don't become ecstatic and you are not plunged into violent grief; you don't pray for rain, neither do you dance a jig. You live like a happy rock in the midst of the ocean: you are fixed while everything about you is in turbulent motion. You are fixed in a reality which permits the thought that nothing is fixed, that even the happiest and mightiest rock will one day be utterly dissolved and fluid as the ocean from which it was born.

Recalling his childhood in later life, Adams wrote of the unparalleled bliss of roaming in the open fields and woodlands of the town, of exploring the creeks, hiking the beaches, "of making and sailing boats...swimming, skating, flying kites and shooting marbles, bat and ball, football...wrestling and sometimes boxing," shooting at crows and ducks, and "running about to quiltings and frolics and sances among the boys and girls." The first fifteen years o fhis life, he said, :went off like a fairytale".

She was her own kind of dreamer, a blind mathematician skating along the thin surface of life, believing in the saving power of logic, reason, and information, overlooking the whole murky expanse of feeling and animal instinct that was the real driver of human behavior, the real author of history.

About how you can skate over the surface of the world for your entire life, visiting, leaving, without ever really falling through. But you can’t do that, it isn’t good enough. You have to be able to fall through. You have to be able to sink, to immerse yourself. You can’t just skate over the surface and visit and leave.

Spirit is a child, the tune of dancing feet its lullaby.

Order is the public façade we’re called upon to wear, the politeness of a gathering of civilized strangers, and the thin ice on which we all skate.

Skate, if it were possible to choose who we fall in love with, no one would ever get it done, because we’d all be chasing after this ideal person who doesn’t even exist.

Skate, you’re about to pop the best wheelie of your life.

No. No risk, no failure. And without failure you’re not really human. You’re just skating on the surface of life.

Burdened no more is soul for whom life flows through dance like breath.

That’s the great thing about music. If you played it, it’s correct. The worst musical train wreck hurts absolutely no one. It’s all part of the show. In fact it’s how we get to the great stuff. There is no penalty for skating on the edge or throwing ourselves off the cliff. So we do.

The male rabbits began chattering their teeth against another’s, filling the room with a spastic, scratching sound, similar to a full shift of skate blades on a puck chase, cutting fresh ice. “An animal on a farm has no worth if it isn’t useful. I earned my right to survive--I’m named!

Horror and terror lurk behind the walls provided so wisely by our ancestors. We tear them down at our peril. We skate, unconsciously, on thin ice, with deep, cold waters below, where unimaginable monsters lurk.

Life may be chemistry, but it's a special circumstance of chemistry. Organisms exist not because of reactions that are possible, but because of reactions that are barely possible. Too much reactivity and we would spontaneously combust. Too little, and we would turn cold and die. Proteins enable these barely possible reactions, allowing us to live on the edges of chemical entropy-skating perilously, but never falling in.

You want religion?” Finn pushed back a lock of my hair. “Then I’ll get on my knees and worship you for the rest of my life. You want to save someone? You’ve already done it. You saved me. You want heaven?” His hand skated up the back of my skirt. I shivered. His deep voice hummed in my ear. “I’ll take you there right now.

Life itself seemed so alarmingly exigent, to require so much of the self. It was too difficult to remember and think and express and understand - all things I needed to be able to do to talk. To keep my face animated at the same time was insult added to injury. It was like trying to cook and roller-skate and sing and type all at once.

I made it three days before the text messages started one afternoon while I was trying to finish warming up before our afternoon session. I had gotten to the LC later than usual and had gone straight to the training room, praising Jesus that I’d decided to change my clothes before leaving the diner once I’d seen what time it was and had remembered lunchtime traffic was a real thing. I was in the middle of stretching my hips when my phone beeped from where I’d left it on top of my bag. I took it out and snickered immediately at the message after taking my time with it. Jojo: WHAT THE FUCK JASMINE I didn’t need to ask what my brother was what-the-fucking over. It had only been a matter of time. It was really hard to keep a secret in my family, and the only reason why my mom and Ben—who was the only person other than her who knew—had kept their mouths closed was because they had both agreed it would be more fun to piss off my siblings by not saying anything and letting them find out the hard way I was going to be competing again. Life was all about the little things. So, I’d slipped my phone back into my bag and kept stretching, not bothering to respond because it would just make him more mad. Twenty minutes later, while I was still busy stretching, I pulled my phone out and wasn’t surprised more messages appeared. Jojo: WHY WOULD YOU NOT TELL ME Jojo: HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME Jojo: DID THE REST OF YOU KEEP THIS FROM ME Tali: What happened? What did she not tell you? Tali: OH MY GOD, Jasmine, did you get knocked up? Tali: I swear, if you got knocked up, I’m going to beat the hell out of you. We talked about contraception when you hit puberty. Sebastian: Jasmine’s pregnant? Rubes: She’s not pregnant. Rubes: What happened, Jojo? Jojo: MOM DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THIS Tali: Would you just tell us what you’re talking about? Jojo: JASMINE IS SKATING WITH IVAN LUKOV Jojo: And I found out by going on Picturegram. Someone at the rink posted a picture of them in one of the training rooms. They were doing lifts. Jojo: JASMINE I SWEAR TO GOD YOU BETTER EXPLAIN EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW Tali: ARE YOU KIDDING ME? IS THIS TRUE? Tali: JASMINE Tali: JASMINE Tali: JASMINE Jojo: I’m going on Lukov’s website right now to confirm this Rubes: I just called Mom but she isn’t answering the phone Tali: She knew about this. WHO ELSE KNEW? Sebastian: I didn’t. And quit texting Jas’s name over and over again. It’s annoying. She’s skating again. Good job, Jas. Happy for you. Jojo: ^^ You’re such a vibe kill Sebastian: No, I’m just not flipping my shit because she got a new partner. Jojo: SHE DIDN’T TELL US FIRST THO. What is the point of being related if we didn’t get the scoop before everybody else? Jojo: I FOUND OUT ON PICTUREGRAM Sebastian: She doesn’t like you. I wouldn’t tell you either. Tali: I can’t find anything about it online. Jojo: JASMINE Tali: JASMINE Jojo: JASMINE Tali: JASMINE Tali: Tell us everything or I’m coming over to Mom’s today. Sebastian: You’re annoying. Muting this until I get out of work. Jojo: Party pooper Tali: Party pooper Jojo: Jinx Tali: Jinx Sebastian: Annoying ... I typed out a reply, because knowing them, if I didn’t, the next time I looked at my phone, I’d have an endless column of JASMINE on there until they heard from me. That didn’t mean my response had to be what they wanted. Me: Who is Ivan Lukov?

don’t have anybody special in my life anymore. To be honest… that’s why I didn’t write you back for a while. My girl broke up with me right after I got here. It came out of nowhere. How long have you been with your boyfriend? Ice-skating

It's only life. We all get through it. Not all of us complete the journey in the same condition. Along the way, some lose their legs or eyes in accidents or altercations, while others skate through years with nothing worse to worry about than an occasional bad-hair day.

For my whole life, the sound of my skates hitting the ice and the puck sliding into the net were the only things that brought me pure happiness. I was sure there would be no other sound or substance that could rival that feeling of euphoria. Except now, I feel like I’m an addict who got his first hit after years of sobriety Summer’s light laughter fills my ears and drifts to a part of my brain that brands it into my memory. Now the thing that brings me peace, what I yearn for like a game-winning goal, is the sound of her laugher and the sight of her smile.

It is understandable you would want to come back as yourself into a wonderland with the sharpness of color of the Queen of Hearts in a newly opened pack of cards. But coming back as yourself is resurrection. It is uncommon. It may even be greater than the scope of mathematics. We cannot talk with definition about our souls, but it is certain that we will decompose. Some dust of our bodies may end up in a horse, wasp, cockerel, frog, flower, or leaf, but for every one of these sensational assemblies there are a quintillion microorganisms. It is far likelier that the greater part of us will become protists than a skyscraping dormouse. What is likely is that, sooner or later, carried in the wind and in rivers, or your graveyard engulfed in the sea, a portion of each of us will be given new life in the cracks, vents, or pools of molten sulphur on which the tonguefish skate. You will be in Hades, the staying place of the spirits of the dead. You will be drowned in oblivion, the River Lethe, swallowing water to erase all memory. It will not be the nourishing womb you began your life in. It will be a submergence. You will take your place in the boiling-hot fissures, among the teeming hordes of nameless microorganisms that mimic no forms, because they are the foundation of all forms. In your reanimation you will be aware only that you are a fragment of what once was, and are no longer dead. Sometimes this will be an electric feeling, sometimes a sensation of the acid you eat, or the furnace under you. You will burgle and rape other cells in the dark for a seeming eternity, but nothing will come of it. Hades is evolved to the highest state of simplicity. It is stable. Whereas you are a tottering tower, so young in evolutionary terms, and addicted to consciousness.

I smile up at his beautiful face, feeling so at ease in his arms. So safe and content. For so long I’ve felt like a small boat set adrift on a perilous sea. Ilmari Kinnunen came skating into my life as this closed-off, moody bear of a goalie. I smile, knowing with such clarity how he fits with us. He’s my safe harbor.

She realized that the stains on the pot—like the scratches on her records, the dent on the kitchen floor where she dropped a skate, and the lines on her face—they all added up to the same thing: her life. They said, in their own way, the only thing that any of us can say, the only thing that is worth saying: I passed this way. I was here.

I was surprised because, like I said, he tends to ask the more skate-under-the-radar questions. The ones other people miss.

Limit not to only five, when the divine gifts the supreme sixth; the sense of dance

Jacob explains that he distinguishes ordinary questioning from “deep questioning.” Ordinary questioning skates along the surface, like Siri. Deep questioning is slow and immersive.

There is a complexity to life that I often overlook. There is a depth of thinking, there is a richness. I am skating on the surface.

I’d discovered over the past few years that when everything in your life sucked, making an absurd college goal your primary focus became an extraordinary diversion.

Well, we spent enough on gymnastics.' 'Christ, did we,' said Maureen. 'So many lessons.' So many lessons, it was true: art and music and ice-skating; Lily's every fleeting interest enthusiastically, abundantly indulged. Not to mention the many more practical investments--chemistry tutoring when she struggled, English enrichment when she excelled, SAT courses to propel her to the school and then, presumably, the career of her dreams. What costs had been sunk, what objections had been suppressed, to deliver their daughter into the open and waiting arms of her beautiful life.

James Brown had many guises, many names: Crip, Music Box, The Hardest Working Man In Show Business, Mr. Please Please Please, Butane James, Soul Brother Number One, Skates, The Godfather of Soul...He was His Own Bad Bad Self, the Sex Machine, Black Elvis, the Minister of the New New Super Heavy Funk, The Original Disco Man, Universal James. But before any of them, he was simply a dancer doing the James Brown.

Audience of angels descend in the ambiance reciting praises in your glory, when you wear your dance shoes, when you arrive at the stage and with every step you take beneath your feet heaven moves. That is the power of dance.

Or rather, she could - could find a way to skip from house to house, like stones skating across the river - but she will not. Because when she thinks of it, she feels neither like the river nor the stone, but like a hand, as it tires of throwing

Francesca had grown up watching me, like I'd grown up watching Sheila. She said I was inspiring, but what had I inspired? There was no joy left in her, no light. Those smiles were a mask, concealing a molten core of grasping ambition. I wanted to shake her by the shoulders and tell her it wasn't too late. She could wake up. She could realize there was more to life than winning. Happiness couldn't be won. It couldn't be hung around our necks while a crowd of thousands cheered. It wasn't a prize, something we had to suffer and toil to earn. If we wanted happiness, we had to create it ourselves. Not in one shining moment on a medal stand, but every single day, over and over again. I could have told Francesca all that, but it wouldn't have mattered. She'd have to learn for herself, like I did.

You said it wasn't fair. Over and over again you kept saying that. You said, There are so many kids that want to die. She's probably the one that wanted to live the most. I thought, no, I want to live as much as she did. But only if... and then I realized how much it sucked for me to think that. Think about myself like that, complain. I was here and I could go dancing and sweat all night and eat donuts and go roller-skating and take bubble baths and grow up. I had you. Right there with me. I had you living in my life and I was alive.

If we walked through life on roller skates, surely there would be no stress situation that would rob us of our calm, we would simply be careful to do everything with caution, while still enjoying the pleasure it feels to simply go through life and disheveled with the wind.

She was her own kind of dreamer, a blind mathematician skating along the thin surface of life, believing in the saving power of logic, reason, and information, overlooking the whole murky expanse of feeling and animal instinct that was the real driver of human behavior, the real author of history. Since

You can skate over the surface of the world for your entire life, visiting, leaving, without ever really falling through. But you can’t do that, it isn’t good enough. You have to be able to fall through. You have to be able to sink, to immerse yourself. You can’t just skate over the surface and visit and leave.

The pat on the back becomes more important than the music or the skating. One part of us becomes ever more committed to earning the pat on the back, while another subversive part—that we try to ignore—kicks and screams and resists the teacher’s authority. This is the part that gives us all kinds of excuses for not practicing.

be blond. I know, they're shitty prejudices. There must be Russian brunettes out there with names that are super simple to pronounce, so simple you'd shout them out for no other reason than the fun of saying such an easy name. I guess there even could be some Russian girls who have never laced up a pair of skates in their life.

"If you prefer it, Your Excellency, a private room will be free directly: Prince Golitsin with a lady. Fresh oysters have come in." "Ah, oysters!" Stepan Arkadyevich became thoughtful. "How if we were to change our program, Levin?" he said, keeping his finger on the bill of fare. And his face expressed serious hesitation. "Are the oysters good? Mind, now!" "They're Flensburg, Your Excellency. We've no Ostend." "Flensburg will do -- but are they fresh?" "Only arrived yesterday." "Well, then, how if we were to begin with oysters, and so change the whole program? Eh?" "It's all the same to me. I should like cabbage soup and porridge better than anything; but of course there's nothing like that here." "Porridge a la Russe, Your Honor would like?" said the Tatar, bending down to Levin, like a nurse speaking to a child. "No, joking apart, whatever you choose is sure to be good. I've been skating, and I'm hungry. And don't imagine," he added, detecting a look of dissatisfaction on Oblonsky's face, "that I shan't appreciate your choice. I don't object to a good dinner." "I should hope so! After all, it's one of the pleasures of life," said Stepan Arkadyevich. "Well, then, my friend, you give us two -- or better say three-dozen oysters, clear soup with vegetables..." "Printaniere," prompted the Tatar. But Stepan Arkadyevich apparently did not care to allow him the satisfaction of giving the French names of the dishes. "With vegetables in it, you know. Then turbot with thick sauce, then... roast beef; and mind it's good. Yes, and capons, perhaps, and then stewed fruit." The Tatar, recollecting that it was Stepan Arkadyevich's way not to call the dishes by the names in the French bill of fare, did not repeat them after him, but could not resist rehearsing the whole menu to himself according to the bill: "Soupe printaniere, turbot sauce Beaumarchais, poulard a l'estragon, Macedoine de fruits..." and then instantly, as though worked by springs, laying down one bound bill of fare, he took up another, the list of wines, and submitted it to Stepan Arkadyevich. "What shall we drink?" "What you like, only not too much. Champagne," said Levin. "What! to start with? You're right though, I dare say. Do you like the white seal?" "Cachet blanc," prompted the Tatar. "Very well, then, give us that brand with the oysters, and then we'll see." "Yes, sir. And what table wine?" "You can give us Nuits. Oh, no -- better the classic Chablis." "Yes, sir. And your cheese, Your Excellency?" "Oh, yes, Parmesan. Or would you like another?" "No, it's all the same to me," said Levin, unable to suppress a smile.

I want to wear flip-flops for the rest of my life.  They’re not just mere footwear.  They can act as makeshift fly swatters, they clap for you when your hands are tired.  And once I saw a lady take off her flop and swat her kid on the butt.  Yeah, that was probably going to be me one day.  ‘The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Not a panic attack exactly, more like a spin, a particular condition that surfaced some fourteen years ago, where I suddenly feel as though I'm on a whirring merry-go-round that has just been unplugged mid-ride. It's like I'm gradually slowing to a stop, the silence between my heart's weakening beats stretching longer and longer, as I skate the last loops of my life.

Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach him how to fish with the right line, the right bait, at the right time of day, at the right sort of spot, and if he has the right recreational or commercial licence he may, with practise and experience, actually be able to feed himself and his family for a lifetime. And that is something worth fishing for!

But in the Petit Palais, which Daphne had not visited in thirty years, Roland had what she liked to call ‘a moment’. He retired early from the paintings and waited in the main hall. After she had joined him and they were walking away he let rip. He said that if he ever had to look at one more Madonna and Child, Crucifixion, Assumption, Annunciation and all the rest he would ‘throw up’. Historically, he announced, Christianity had been the cold dead hand on the European imagination. What a gift, that its tyranny had expired. What looked like piety was enforced conformity within a totalitarian mind-state. To question or defy it in the sixteenth century would have been to take your life in your hands. Like protesting against Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Soviet Union. It was not only science that Christianity had obstructed for fifty generations, it was nearly all of culture, nearly all of free expression and enquiry. It buried the open-minded philosophies of classical antiquity for an age, it sent thousands of brilliant minds down irrelevant rabbit holes of pettifogging theology. It had spread its so-called Word by horrific violence and it maintained itself by torture, persecution and death. Gentle Jesus, ha! Within the totality of human experience of the world there was an infinity of subject matter and yet all over Europe the big museums were stuffed with the same lurid trash. Worse than pop music. It was the Eurovision Song Contest in oils and gilt frames. Even as he spoke he was amazed by the strength of his feelings and the pleasure of release. He was talking – exploding – about something else. What a relief it was, he said as he began to cool down, to see a representation of a bourgeois interior, of a loaf of bread on a board beside a knife, of a couple skating on a frozen canal hand in hand, trying to seize a moment of fun ‘while the fucking priest wasn’t looking. Thank God for the Dutch!

I... I remember, she realized. A feeling came over her, so strong that for the smallest of moments, it warmed her soul. Pictures flew through her mind: She and Elsa talking in their bedroom, baking with their mother in the kitchen, running down the central staircase. Do the magic! she heard a voice say, and now she realized it was her younger self begging Elsa to create more snow. Together they had skated around the Great Hall and made snow angels. They had built Olaf! She used to marvel at Elsa's magic and always wanted her sister to use it. Do the magic! she heard herself beg again, and then she saw the moment when everything changed. In her haste to stop Anna from falling off a snow mound, Elsa had accidentally struck her. That was when she and Elsa had been ripped apart. She remembered everything!

Look, no one wants to hear that maybe she’s the reason her mother flew the coop. But my advice to you is to put this behind you. File it away in the drawer that’s saved for all the other crap that isn’t fair, like how the Kardashians are famous and how good-looking people get served faster at restaurants and how a kid who can’t skate to save his life winds up on the varsity hockey team because his dad is the coach.

Before every elementary school classroom had a 'Drop Everything and Read' period, before parents and educators agonized more about children being glued to Call of Duty or getting sucked into the vortex of the Internet, reading as a childhood activity was not always revered. Maybe it was in some families, in some towns, in some magical places that seemed to exist only in stories, but not where I was. Nobody trotted out the kid who read all the time as someone to be admired like the ones who did tennis and ballet and other feats requiring basic coordination. While those other kids pursued their after-school activities in earnest, I failed at art, gymnastics, ice skating, soccer, and ballet with a lethal mix of inability, fear and boredom. Coerced into any group endeavor, I wished I could just be home already. Rainy days were a godsend because you could curl up on a sofa without being banished into the outdoors with an ominous 'Go play outside.' Well into adulthood, I would chastise myself over not settling on a hobby—knitting or yoga or swing dancing or crosswords—and just reading instead. The default position. Everyone else had a passion; where was mine? How much happier I would have been to know that reading was itself a passion. Nobody treated it that way, and it didn't occur to me to think otherwise.

What’s it like to roller-skate in the ballroom with your sister, or to read a book about a pony and wake up the next morning to find one wearing a big velvet bow in the marble foyer, and to love it, to love it so much you name it after the swan you lost, and tell yourself that maybe, somehow, it is the swan, come back from beyond the grave to care for you, because while everyone around you takes care of you, you aren’t really sure that any of them care about you?

There are vanishingly few of them, those days when the game can still surprise us. When it does happen, it comes without warning; we just have to trust that we’ll recognize it. So when the echo of the skates cutting into the ice bounds up the banks of seating, Sune stops and pauses for a moment before casting one final glance over his shoulder again. He sees the fifteen-year-old turn, holding his stick lightly in his hand, then set off again at blistering speed, and Sune will remember this as one of the true blessings in his life: seeing the impossible happen in Beartown for a third time. The caretaker looks up from the screws in the railing and sees the old coach sink onto one of the seats on the top row. At first he seems to be seriously ill. Then the caretaker realizes that it’s because he’s never seen the old man laugh before. Sune is breathing through his nose with tears in his eyes, and the whole rink smells of cherry blossom.

Listen to me closely. I don’t care if you toss your skates in the trash tomorrow. I don’t care what you choose to do for the rest of your life as long as you’re happy.” He chuckles and relaxes back into the chair. “If you’d picked up a basketball all those years ago, I’d be courtside for the rest of my life with one of those big foam fingers. If you take up a paintbrush, I’ll buy every piece that we have wall space for. If you use that big brain of yours for engineering or law, I’ll do whatever I can to show I support you until my last breath.

There are details about your life I really do not want to know about. You told me he taught you how to fight with weapons, but I guess I never…” “Put two and two together?” Katie grinned. “That’s not like you, detective Jules.” “I know. I guess I overlooked the gory details. Blood and guts have never been my forte. I like action. Give me Mission Impossible and CSI, but leave out the gruesome details.” They stopped upon reaching the entrance to the barn. “Roller skating disco lover turns FBI crime scene investigator. I think there’s a book waiting to be written for you.

Asking Wolf to couples' skate is like bungee jumping without a cord-it may be the bravest thing I've ever done in my life. Or it could be the stupidest. There's only one way to find out. I look him dead in the eyes, summoning up both my courage and my sense of reckless abandon, but before I can even speak one syllable- "Oh!" he says, looking over one shoulder and dropping his hands. "Kaitlyn's free now. I gotta get over there!" He rushes off, blowing me an air kiss. My mouth should get used to falling open when he's around, either from his good looks or from his total lack of comprehension of all things polite. Did that just happen? My face in my palms, I lean on my elbows against the rail, invisible, and fall into an intoxicating state of self-pity.

As she grew up, as her character was built, as she became headstrong rather than pert, and clever enough to know when to hide her cleverness, as she discovered friends and social life and a new kind of loneliness, as she came from country to town and began amassing her future memories, she admitted her mothers's rule: they made their mistakes, now you make your mistakes. And there was a logical consequence of this, which became part of Martha's creed: after the age of twenty-five, you were not allowed to blame anything on your parents. Of course, it didn't apply if your parents had done something terrible - had raped and murdered you and stolen all your money and sold you into prostitution - but in the average course of an average life, if you were averagely competent and averagely intelligent, and more so if you were more so, then you were not allowed to blame your parents. Of course you did, there were times when it was just too tempting. If only they'd bought me roller-skates like they promised, if only they'd let me go out with David, if only they'd been different, more loving, richer, cleverer, simpler. If only they'd been more indulgent; if only they'd been more strict. If only they'd encouraged me more; if only they'd praised me for the right things...None of that. Of course Martha felt it, some of the time, wanted to cuddle such resentments, but then she would stop and give herself a talking-to. You're on your own, kid. Damage is a normal part of childhood. Not allowed to blame anything on them anymore. Not allowed.

Pastor Jón: It is pleasant to listen to the birds chirping. But it would be anything but pleasant if the birds were always chirping the truth. Do you think the golden lining of this cloud we see up there in the atmosphere is true? But whoever isn't ready to live and die for that cloud is a man bereft of happiness. Embi: Should there be lyrical fantasies, then, instead of justice? Pastor Jón: Agreement is what matters. Otherwise everyone will be killed. Embi: Agreement about what? Pastor Jón: It doesn't matter. For instance quick-freezing plants, no matter how bad they are. When I repair a broken lock, do you then think it's an object of value or a lock for some treasure chest? Behind the last lock I mended there was kept one dried skate and three pounds of rye meal. I don't need to describe the enterprise that owns a lock of that kind. But if you hold that earthly life is valid on the whole, you repair such a lock with no less satisfaction than the lock for the National Bank where people think the gold is kept. If you don't like this old, rusty, simple lock that some clumsy blacksmith made for an insignificant food-chest long ago, then there is no reason for you to mend the lock in the big bank. If you only repair machinery in quick-freezing plants that pay, you are not to be envied for your role. Embi: What you say, pastor Jón, may be good poetry, but unfortunately has little relevance to the matter I raised with you - on behalf of the ministry. Pastor Jón: Whoever doesn't live in poetry cannot survive here on earth.

And as Adeline watches, she realizes she cannot stay. Or rather, she could—could find a way to skip from house to house, like stones skating across the river—but she will not. Because when she thinks of it, she feels neither like the river nor the stone, but like a hand, as it tires of throwing. There is Estele, closing her door. There is Isabelle, one moment kind, and the next filled with horror. Later, much later, Addie will make a game of these cycles, will see how long she can step from perch to perch before she falls. But right now, the pain is too fresh, too sharp, and she cannot fathom going through those motions, cannot weather the weary look on her father’s face, the rebuke in Estele’s eyes. Adeline LaRue cannot be a stranger here, to these people she has always known. It hurts too much, watching them forget her.

We think we make bucket lists to ward off regret, but really they help us to ward off death. After all, the longer our bucket lists are, the more time we imagine we have left to accomplish everything on them. Cutting the list down, however, makes a tiny dent in our denial systems, forcing us to acknowledge a sobering truth: Life has a 100 percent mortality rate. Every single one of us will die, and most of us have no idea how or when that will happen. In fact, as each second passes, we’re all in the process of coming closer to our eventual deaths. As the saying goes, none of us will get out of here alive. [...] Who wants to think about this? How much easier it is to become death procrastinators! Many of us take for granted the people we love and the things we find meaningful, only to realize, when our deadline is announced, that we’d been skating by on the project: our lives.

We think we make bucket lists to ward off regret, but really they help us to ward off death. After all, the longer our bucket lists are, the more time we imagine we have left to accomplish everything on them. Cutting the list down, however, makes a tiny dent in our denial systems, forcing us to acknowledge a sobering truth: Life has a 100 percent mortality rate. Every single one of us will die, and most of us have no idea how or when that will happen. In fact, as each second passes, we’re all in the process of coming closer to our eventual deaths. As the saying goes, none of us will get out of here alive. [...] Who wants to think about this? How much easier it is to become death procrastinators! Many of us take for granted the people we love and the things we find meaningful, only to realize, when our deadline is announced, that we’d been skating by on the project: our lives.”-Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, p.79, Lori Gottlieb “It’s no surprise that we often dream about our fears. We have a lot of fears. What are we afraid of? We are afraid of being hurt. We are afraid of being humiliated. We are afraid of failure and we are afraid of success. We are afraid of being alone and we are afraid of connection. We are afraid to listen to what our hearts are telling us. We are afraid of being unhappy and we are afraid of being too happy. We are afraid of not having our parents’ approval and we are afraid of accepting ourselves for who we really are. We are afraid of bad health and good fortune. We are afraid of our envy and having too much. We are afraid to have hope for things that we might not get. We are afraid of change and we are afraid of not changing. We are afraid of something happening to our kids, our jobs. We are afraid of not having control and afraid of our own power. We are afraid of how briefly we are alive and how long we will be dead. (We are afraid that after we die, we won’t have mattered.) We are afraid of being responsible for our own lives. Sometimes it takes a while to admit our fears, especially to ourselves.

A dead world is never really dead. Even when the stars vanish in a great exodus, leaving an inky night that swallows the sky. Even when the sound of silence is a terrible thing to listen to in a city that once groaned with noise. But it’s not quite silence, is it? There are the birds that soar over bare roof rafters, egrets and jackdaws and scruffy brown scraps that go by a multitude of names calling joyfully to each other. There are the nocturnal animals who claw and scrape over cobblestones, lifting their gazes to the two pale moons impressed against a violet sky. There are the trees that stretch upwards, overgrown and languorous, from leaf-strewn courtyards, extending gracefully through balconies and walkways. And below them, the ferns that unfurl in dark, damp corners that might still bear cracked tiles in parched colours, or spongey wooden skates engraved with toothy chisel marks. Life, persistent and predictably stubborn, goes on. Close your eyes and the stars might not sing in this hushed city of dust and dreams, but there’s still singing nonetheless. Even if there’s just one voice left.

There’s an unexpected lull in the traffic about two-thirds of the way to Darmstadt, and I make the mistake of breathing a sigh of relief. The respite is short-lived. One moment I’m driving along a seemingly empty road, bouncing from side to side on the Smart’s town-car suspension as the hairdryersized engine howls its guts out beneath my buttocks, and the next instant the dashboard in front of me lights up like a flashbulb. I twitch spasmodically, jerking my head up so hard I nearly dent the thin plastic roof. Behind me the eyes of Hell are open, two blinding beacons like the landing lights on an off-course 747. Whoever they are, they’re standing on their brakes so hard they must be smoking. There’s a roar, and then a squat, red Audi sports coupe pulls out and squeezes past my flank close enough to touch, its blonde female driver gesticulating angrily at me. At least I think she’s blonde and female. It’s hard to tell because everything is gray, my heart is trying to exit through my rib cage, and I’m frantically wrestling with the steering wheel to keep the roller skate from toppling over. A fraction of a second later she’s gone, pulling back into the slow lane ahead of me to light off her afterburners. I swear I see red sparks shooting out of her two huge exhaust tubes as she vanishes into the distance, taking about ten years of my life with her.

Inside the Galleria it was dark and dank, with fountains and foliage unchanged from the 1980s. I instantly knew it—an old friend—despite having never stepped foot inside, and the loneliness that had been haunting me all day lifted in an instant. Even though I was two thousand miles from it, I was home. I had just moved from Philly, and I didn’t know a soul. My new life was feeling so empty, I needed cheap stuff to fill it up, and there was something particularly alluring that drew me to the Galleria that day—a store I had heard about that was becoming ubiquitous in Los Angeles, popping up faster than a rash of Starbucks in the cityscape. It was a fast-fashion empire to rule them all—pitch-perfect knockoffs of designer styles on an endlessly rotating trend carousel that changed out daily. If you couldn’t afford a Murakami Louis Vuitton monogram bag or the Miu Miu pleated micro mini, you could pacify yourself with their bogus cousins for a fraction of the price, and not feel bad tossing them when the trends shifted in a month or two. I spotted the store’s golden logo overhead. Forever 21. The name alone was pure poetry written in the California sand. Forever 21—like the spirit of a roller-skating bikini girl riding into the Venice Beach dusk. Forever 21—like Madonna, like Angelyne—faces and bodies sculpted into youthful approximations of their aging corporal forms. Forever 21—the true spirit of Los Angeles. I felt it enter me, I was possessed.

Evolution is largely a temporal phenomenon, Merrill. The environment changes, and populations in that environment change in turn, or they languish. Individual organisms don't evolve; populations do. Nature doesn't give a damn about individuals. The only role we play in evolution is surviving long enough to give birth to offspring who are slightly different from us. Some of our offspring will prosper in a changing environment, and some of them will not. As for us individuals, once we've reproduced, nature has no more use for us. We perish along with our ill-adapted young. Death has always been an essential factor in species survival. Now consider the human race. We are a partial exception to the rule. Unlike other species, we have developed culture. Instead of adapting to a changing environment biologically, we can sometimes adapt to it culturally. If an Ice Age comes along, we don't need to grow fur on our bodies if we invent the fur coat. Culture allows us to adapt to almost any environment, including the harshest, like space. In fact, our cultural adaptation is so robust that it all but obviates the need to evolve biologically. We are so good at adapting to changing conditions with our knowledge and technology that we may deceive ourselves into believing that we are above nature. But only a fools believes that. Nature always has the last word. A star in our neighborhood could go supernova and wipe out all life in our solar system, and no amount of culture could save us from that. That, I believe, is the main reason you want to seed humanity throughout the galaxy. So as not to have all our eggs in one basket... The chief difference between biological and cultural adaptation is that while biological evolution doesn't care about individuals, cultural evolution does, often at the expense of the species. Look at how many times we've nearly wiped ourselves out through cultural means: the nuclear bomb, pollution, climate change, the Outrage. We can't seem to help ourselves. Look at what we've done: we've made individuals all but immortal, even when it means we can have no more children. In one stroke, we've eliminated the two key ingredients of evolution: offspring and death. From a biological perspective, we're skating on mighty thin ice. ... ...as long as the individual reigns supreme, there's a finite limit to our survival. ... We need a means for the individual, not just the species, to participate in biological evolution, and that's what my project is all about. We need to be able to let our biological bodies die, to have offspring that are molded by the changing needs of the environments we find ourselves in, and yet to serially inhabit these bodies as the same individual. That means we need to be able to move our minds from one body to the next. ... Mine is a singularity in which the obsolete individual is invited to cross over to the new, not simply to die out. The existing person need not die to make room for the newcomer. Anyone can play.

Why did you come here-that is, why did you agree to reconsider my proposal?” The question alarmed and startled her. Now that she’d seen him she had only the dimmest, possibly even erroneous recollection of having spoken to him at a ball. Moreover, she couldn’t tell him she was in danger of being cut off by her uncle, for that whole explanation was to humiliating to bear mentioning. “Did I do or say something during our brief meetings the year before last to mislead you, perhaps, into believing I might yearn for the city life?” “It’s hard to say,” Elizabeth said with absolute honesty. “Lady Cameron, do you even remember our meeting?” “Oh, yes, of course. Certainly,” Elizabeth replied, belatedly recalling a man who looked very like him being presented to her at Lady Markham’s. That was it! “We met at Lady Markham’s ball.” His gaze never left her face. “We met in the park.” “In the park?” Elizabeth repeated in sublime embarrassment. “You had stopped to admire the flowers, and the young gentleman who was your escort that day introduced us.” “I see,” Elizabeth replied, her gaze skating away from his. “Would you care to know what we discussed that day and the next day when I escorted you back to the park?” Curiosity and embarrassment warred, and curiosity won out. “Yes, I would.” “Fishing.” “F-fishing?” Elizabeth gasped. He nodded. “Within minutes after we were introduced I mentioned that I had not come to London for the Season, as you supposed, but that I was on my way to Scotland to do some fishing and was leaving London the very next day.” An awful feeling of foreboding crept over Elizabeth as something stirred in her memory. “We had a charming chat,” he continued. “You spoke enthusiastically of a particularly challenging trout you were once able to land.” Elizabeth’s face felt as hot as red coals as he continued, “We quite forgot the time and your poor escort as we shared fishing stories.” He was quiet, waiting, and when Elizabeth couldn’t endure the damning silence anymore she said uneasily, “Was there…more?” “Very little. I did not leave for Scotland the next day but stayed instead to call upon you. You abandoned the half-dozen young bucks who’d come to escort you to some sort of fancy soiree and chose instead to go for another impromptu walk in the park with me.” Elizabeth swallowed audibly, unable to meet his eyes. “Would you like to know what we talked about that day?” “No, I don’t think so.” He chucked but ignored her reply, “You professed to be somewhat weary of the social whirl and confessed to a longing to be in the country that day-which is why we went to the park. We had a charming time, I thought.” When he fell silent, Elizabeth forced herself to meet his gaze and say with resignation, “And we talked of fishing?” “No,” he said. “Of boar hunting.” Elizabeth closed her eyes in sublime shame. “You related an exciting tale of a wild board your father had shot long ago, and of how you watched the hunt-without permission-from the very tree below which the boar as ultimately felled. As I recall,” he finished kindly, “you told me that it was your impulsive cheer that revealed your hiding place to the hunters-and that caused you to be seriously reprimanded by your father.” Elizabeth saw the twinkle lighting his eyes, and suddenly they both laughed. “I remember your laugh, too,” he said, still smiling, “I thought it was the loveliest sound imaginable. So much so that between it and our delightful conversation I felt very much at ease in your company.” Realizing he’d just flattered her, he flushed, tugged at his neckcloth, and self-consciously looked away.

That night, atrocities were being committed by civilised Germans all over Leipzig, all over the country. Nearly every Jewish home and business in my city was vandalised, burned or otherwise destroyed, as were our synagogues. As were our people. It wasn’t just Nazi soldiers and fascist thugs who turned against us. Ordinary citizens, our friends and neighbours since before I was born, joined in the violence and the looting. When the mob was done destroying property, they rounded up Jewish people – many of them young children – and threw them into the river that I used to skate on as a child. The ice was thin and the water freezing. Men and women I’d grown up with stood on the riverbanks, spitting and jeering as people struggled. ‘Shoot them!’ they cried. ‘Shoot the Jewish dogs!’ What had happened to my German friends that they became murderers? How is it possible to create enemies from friends, to create such hate? Where was the Germany I had been so proud to be a part of, the country where I was born, the country of my ancestors? One day we were friends, neighbours, colleagues, and the next we were told we were sworn enemies. When I think of those Germans relishing our pain, I want to ask them, ‘Have you got a soul? Have you got a heart?’ It was madness, in the true sense of the word – otherwise civilised people lost all ability to tell right from wrong. They committed terrible atrocities, and worse, they enjoyed it. They thought they were doing the right thing. And even those who could not fool themselves that we Jews were the enemy did nothing to stop the mob. If enough people had stood up then, on Kristallnacht, and said, ‘Enough! What are you doing? What is wrong with you?’ then the course of history would have been different. But they did not. They were scared. They were weak. And their weakness allowed them to be manipulated into hatred. As they loaded me onto a truck to take me away, blood mixing with the tears on my face, I stopped being proud to be German. Never again.

Glaring, I snarled, “Kiss me. Give me one fracture of human company, and I’ll never say another word to you again. I’ll be whatever you want. Just kiss me!” His eyes narrowed. “You’re an idiot.” “So you keep telling me.” “You’re wasting your time.” “So you keep telling me.” “I don’t want to kiss you!” I lashed out. My arms came up. I opened my palm. And I slapped the self-righteous, egotistical arsehole on the cheek. The moment went from lust-heavy to stagnant with violence. We stared, caught dead centre in war. “You’re a fucking nightmare,” he snapped. “Kiss me.” “You’re ruining my life.” “Kiss me.” “You’re—” “Kiss me, Jethro. Kiss me. Just fucking kiss me and give me—” His body crashed against mine. His hands flew up, grabbing my cheeks and holding me firm. His lips, oh his lips, they bruised mine as his head tilted, and with pure anger, he gave me what I’d wanted for weeks. He kissed me. My lungs were empty—he’d stolen all my air, but I no longer survived on oxygen. I survived on his mouth, his taste, his unbridled energy pouring down my throat. His tongue tore past my lips, taking me savage and hungry. There was nothing sweet or gentle. This was a punishment. A reminder that I hadn’t won. He wasn’t kissing me. He was fighting me in every underhanded way. His hands dropped from my cheeks, cupping my breasts. The violence in his touch throbbed instantly. I arched my back, opening my mouth wider to scream, but he swallowed my cries, kissing me deeper, harder, stealing every inch of sanity I had left. I thought a kiss would put me on even ground—show him that he did care. That he was human—just like me. I hadn’t gambled on being detonated into a billion tiny pieces that had no notion of who I’d been before he’d stolen my soul. He backed me up, faster and faster to the bed. His breath saturated my lungs. His touch skated from my cheeks, to my breasts, to my waist, to my arse. Jerking me hard against the huge length of arousal in his jeans. The bed stopped our motion, tumbling us onto the sheets, but nothing, absolutely nothing could unweld our lips. We were joined, kissing, frantic, desperate. He groaned as I slid my hands beneath his t-shirt, needing to feel his skin against mine. He was blood and fire and heat. So different to the glacier he pretended to be. “Fuck,” he grunted

It's funny, you know. We're free. We make choices. We weigh things in our minds, consider everything carefully, use all the tools of logic and education. And in the end, what we mostly do is what we have no choice but to do. Makes you think, why bother? But you bother because you do, that's why. Because you're a DNA-brand computer running Childhood 1.0 software. They update the software but the changes are always just around the edges. You have the brain you have, the intelligence, the talents, the strengths and weaknesses you have, from the moment they take you out of the box and throw away the Styrofoam padding. But you have the fears you picked up along the way. The terrors of age four or six or eight are never suspended, just layered over. The dread I'd felt so recently, a dread that should be so much greater because the facts had been so much more horrible, still could not diminish the impact of memories that had been laid down long years before. It's that way all through life, I guess. I have a relative who says she still gets depressed every September because in the back of her mind it's time for school to start again. She's my great-aunt. The woman is sixty-seven and still bumming over the first day of school five-plus decades ago. It's sad in a way because the pleasures of life get old and dated fast. The teenage me doesn't get the jolt the six-year-old me got from a package of Pop Rocks. The me I've become doesn't rush at the memories of the day I skated down a parking ramp however many years ago. Pleasure fades, gets old, gets thrown out with last year's fad. Fear, guilt, all that stuff stays fresh. Maybe that's why people get so enraged when someone does something to a kid. Hurt a kid and he hurts forever. Maybe an adult can shake it off. Maybe. But with a kid, you hurt them and it turns them, shapes them, becomes part of the deep, underlying software of their lives. No delete. I don't know. I don't know much. I feel like I know less all the time. Rate I'm going, by the time I'm twenty-one I won't know a damned thing. But still I was me. Had no choice, I guess. I don't know, maybe that's bull and I was just feeling sorry for myself. But, bottom line, I dried my eyes, and I pushed my dirty, greasy hair back off my face, and I started off down the road again because whatever I was, whoever I was, however messed up I might be, I wasn't leaving April behind. Maybe it was all an act programmed into me from the get-go, or maybe it grew up out of some deep-buried fear, I mean maybe at some level I was really just as pathetic as Senna thought I was. Maybe I was a fake. Whatever. Didn't matter. I was going back to the damned dragon, and then I was getting April out, and everything and everyone else could go screw themselves. One good thing: For now at least, I was done being scared.

As the sun set, I ate a hospital meal and watched TV. Every few minutes, I glanced at the girl on the bed and tried to see Raven. I struggled to remember her smile and laugh. With her face so swollen, she didn’t seem like my love. I worried I’d lost her because I brought Caleb to Ellsberg. Eventually, the nurse showed me how to turn the chair into a pull out bed. I thanked her, but the thing was too damn small for me to fit on. Besides, I didn’t want to sleep until Raven woke up. Finally, I gave into my weird little urge to kiss the sleeping beauty. I needed to know she was okay. Know she wanted me to stay because she still loved me. I felt nervous until her swollen lips twitched into a smile after my kiss. “Tell me a story,” she mumbled while gripping my shirt with her good hand and tugging me into the bed with her. I adjusted our bodies just enough for me to rest next to her. While the position wasn’t comfortable, I finally relaxed at knowing my woman wanted me close. Caressing her battered face with my fingers, I loved how she smiled for me. Even in pain and after a hellish day, she soothed my fears. “Once upon a time,” I said and she smiled again, “there was a lonely fool who wasted one day after another of his life. One day, he met the most fascinating chick and she quickly wrapped the fool around her finger. She loved him in the best way and saved him from himself. He loved her too and only wanted for her to be happy and safe.” Hesitating, I frowned at the sight of her suffering. As if knowing what I was thinking, she reached up and ran a finger of my lips. “More.” “After the evil… let’s call them gnomes because I hate those ugly little fuckers. So, once the gnomes were destroyed, the fool and his lovely savior bought a big house for all the beautiful blond babies they would have together.” As Raven smiled at this idea, my uneasiness faded. “Their kids all had names with a V in them to honor their hot parents.” Raven laughed then moaned at the gesture. Still, she kept smiling for me. “The fool, his beautiful woman, and their army of glorious babies played videogames, bowled, and roller skated. They were always happy and never sad in a town with their friends and family. They all lived happily ever after.” Raven swollen lips smiled enough to show her missing tooth. Even though she was essentially blind with her battered eyes, she knew I’d seen her mouth and covered it with her hand. “You’re beautiful, darling. Nothing will ever change that.” Raven grunted, unconvinced. “There’s more to love about you than your beauty.” Another grunt followed by a hint of a pout. “Sugar, if I got all banged up and my stunning good looks were damaged, you’d still love me, right?” Raven laughed, but said nothing, so I answered for her. “Of course, you would. My amazing personality and giant brain would keep you horny even if my hot body wasn’t at its best.” Laughing harder now, Raven leaned against me. “I liked your story.” “Unlike most fairytales, this one is coming true.

I had a dream where I was in a place that served steak and mashed potatoes and the soup! The pasta soup was heavenly even better than my mother’s homemade recipe. Every spoonful of the soup reminded me of the sun. The mashed potatoes were so smooth that they could slide down my gullet. The steak was medium-rare, my favorite, and every bite reminded me of the steak my mom made but it was one hundred and one times better.  And there was also iced tea and every sip of it felt refreshing like a cold, winter morning with the sun shining merrily and my mom and I throwing snowballs at each other. I  ate and drank until I could eat no more. I felt as if my stomach was about to combust. But then in came the tiramisu. It was better than anything I had ever tasted. The rich smell of coffee wafted up from it. It reminded me of the coffee shop my mom went to when I was little. Despite the fact that my stomach was about to explode I managed to fit in three more slices of tiramisu before I could eat no more. But then came the Ice cream. It was my favorite flavor, mango. The ice cream was silky and sweet. It was like I was on a sunny June morning, a ray of sunlight shining in my face. The sensation intensified as mango juice dribbled down my chin like sunlight itself. I managed six scoops before I was sure my belly would explode. Every moment of eating the ice cream was sunsational. Finally came the float. It was vanilla ice cream on top of some Fanta even though my mom insisted root beer was one hundred times better. It tasted amazing. It was like the early spring making our ice crack in the pond on which my mother and I go ice skating every winter. It was happy but also sad at the same time as if my old life called back for me.

It seems like a long time has passed since I was skating solo in a parking-lot in small town Ontario, Canada humming a Suicidal Tendencies song to keep myself motivated. I liked to alter the lyrics from "He rips, when he skates, cause he never hesitates!" to "She rips, when she skates..." I hoped that somewhere out there a girl was skating who truly did rip, and it would be even more incredible if I could see her skate in real life and have a conversation. I was completely in the dark.

Each evening, after my parents’ self-medication, their behavior would change. Some of the time they would be happier and we could get through the evening unscathed. But sometimes it would get ugly.

I am The Black Book. Between my top and my bottom, my right and my left, I hold what I have seen, what I have done, and what I have thought. I am everything I have hated: labor without harvest; death without honor; life without land or law. I am a black woman holding a white child in her arms singing to her own baby lying unattended in the grass. I am all the ways I have failed: I am the black slave owner, the buyer of Golden Peacock Bleach Crème and Dr. Palmer’s Skin Whitener, the self- hating player of the dozens; I am my own nigger joke. I am all the ways I survived: I am tun-mush, hoecake cooked on a hoe; I am Fourteen black jockeys winning the Kentucky Derby. I am the creator of hundreds of patented inventions; I am Lafitte the pirate and Marie Laveau. I am Bessie Smith winning a roller-skating contest; I am quilts and ironwork, fine carpentry and lace. I am the wars I fought, the gold I mined, The horses I broke, the trails I blazed. I am all the things I have seen: The New York Caucasian newspaper, the scarred back of Gordon the slave, the Draft Riots, darky tunes, and mer- chants distorting my face to sell thread, soap, shoe polish coconut. And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing. I am the sound of my own voice singing “Sangaree.” I am ring-shouts, and blues, ragtime and gospels. I am mojo, voodoo, and gold earrings. I am not complete here; there is much more, but there is no more time and no more space . . . and I have journeys to take, ships to name, and crews.

Why’re you still here?” She yawned. “Go away. Jared will be here any moment, and I’ll be nothing but an unfortunate memory.” I should go. Pivot and leave. To my relief, I started doing just that. The echo of my footsteps bounced on the bare walls. I did not look back. Knew that if I caught a glimpse of her again, I’d make a mistake. This was for the best. It was time to cut my losses, admit my one mistake in my thirty-one years of life, and move on. My life would return to normal. Peaceful. Tidy. Noiseless. Unexpensive. My hand curled around the doorknob, about to push it open. “Hey, asshole.” I stopped but didn’t turn around. I refused to answer to the word. “What do you say—one last time for the road?” I glanced behind my shoulder, knowing I shouldn’t, and found my soon-to-be ex-wife propped on the hood of my Maybach, her dress hiked up her waist, revealing she’d worn no panties. Her bare pussy glistened, ready for me. A dare. I never shied away from those. Throwing caution to the wind (and the remaining few brain cells she hadn’t fried with her mindless conversation), I marched to her. When I reached the car, she lifted her hand to stop me, slapping her palm against my chest. “Not so fast.” It is going to be fast and a half, seeing as I’m about to come just from watching you like this. I arched an eyebrow. “Cold feet?” “Nah, low temperature is your thing. Don’t wanna steal your thunder. Either we go all the way, or we go nowhere at all. It’s all or nothing.” It infuriated me that each time I gave her a choice, she fabricated another. If I gave her an option, she swapped it with one of her creation. And now, on the heels of my ultimatum, she’d dished out her own. And like a doomed fool, I chose everything. I chose my downfall. We exploded together in a filthy, frustrated kiss full of tongue and teeth. She latched on to my neck, half-choking me, half-hugging me. I fumbled with the zipper of my suit pants, freeing my cock, which by this point gleamed with precum, so heavy and so hard it was uncomfortable to stand. My teeth grazed down her chin, trailing her throat before I did what I hadn’t done in five fucking years and pushed into her, all at once. Bare. My cock disappeared inside her, hitting a hot spot, squeezed to death by her muscles. Oh, fuck. My forehead fell against hers. A thin coat of sweat glued us together. Never in my life had anything felt quite so good. I wanted to evaporate into mist, seep into her, and never come back. I wanted to live, breathe, and exist inside my beautiful, maddening, conniving, infuriating curse of a wife. She was the one thing I never wanted and the only thing I craved. Worst, still, was the fact that I knew I couldn’t deny her a single thing she desired, be it a frock or piece of jewelry. Or, unfortunately, my heart on a platter, speared straight through with a skewer for her to devour. Still beating and as vibrant red as candied apples. I retreated, then slammed into her harder. Pulled and rushed back in. My fingers gripped her by the waist, pinning her down, wild with lust and desire. I drove into her in jerky, frenzied movements of a man starved for sex, fucking the ever-living shit out of her. Now that I’d officially filed a restraining order against my logic, I grabbed the front of her throat, sinking my teeth onto her lower lip. My spearmint breath skated over her face. The hood of the car warmed her thighs, still hot from the engine, jacking up the temperature between us even further. Small, desperate yelps fled her mouth. The only sounds in the cavernous space came from my grunts, our skin slapping together, and her tiny gasps of pleasure. The car rocked back and forth to the rhythm of my thrusts... (chapter 44)

The seventies were crazy everywhere, but crazier in Los Angeles. It was the era of freewheeling drugs and sex, the rag end of the sixties. I refer to sprees, to strange couplings and triplings, to nights that started with beer and wine and ended with cocaine and capsules, to debaucheries too various to chronicle. In a sense, we were all Robert Mitchum, smoking rope in bed with two girls while the sun was still noon high. We thought it was normal. You would walk into a house for a pool party, and there, on the cocktail table in the center of the living room, as if it were nuts or cooked shrimp, would be a platter of cocaine. We did it because we were stupid, because we did not know the danger. When I talk about my drug years, I am talking about twenty-four months in the middle of the seventies. I was in the rock and roll world, which meant I was around the stuff all the time. Of course, it was more than mere proximity. I was fun when I was high, talkative and all-encompassing. I could go forever, never be done talking. To some extent, I was really self-medicating, using the drugs to skate over issues in my own life. The fact is, money and success had come so fast, while I was away doing something else, not paying attention, that, when I finally realized where I was and just what I had, I could not understand it. There was this voice in my head, saying, Who do you think you are? What do you think you did? You are a fraud! You don’t deserve any of this! I tortured myself, and let the anxiety well up, then beat back the anxiety with the drugs, on and on, until one day, I stood up and said, “Screw it. That’s over. I’m done.” No rehab, no counseling, nothing like that. Just a moment of clarity, in which I saw myself from the outside, the mess I was making, the waste. I was slipping, not working as hard as I used to. I started leaving the office early on Fridays, then skipping Fridays altogether. Then I started leaving early on Thursdays, then arriving late on Mondays. I was letting myself go. Then one day, I just decided, It has to stop. I threw away the pills and bottles, took a cold shower, had a barbershop shave, and stepped into the cool of Sunset Boulevard, and began fresh. Maybe it had to do with my family situation. I was a father again.

Even I started emoting things! As my hero Samuel Johnson might have said, it was like watching a walrus trying to figure skate—it wasn’t good, but you were impressed that you were seeing it at all. Then, after the panel, we celebrated with another group hug. I thought, “This is fantastic! I’ve got to be around theater people more!” I vowed to alter my life.

When you skate across the days, leaving a wake as thin as spider silk, you’re not accustomed to shouting or to chasing after strangers with murder on their minds.

The earth, the rocks, the sky and I interpenetrate. We are one. I feel a deep, beatific relaxation. The boundaries that I think of as me are suddenly no more than illusion. My body’s limits are a product of the same surface tension that allows a water bug to skate on top of the pond. Now, as I lie here, the tension is released, the illusion suspended. The vaired personalities and centers of energy that make up my hillside merge, and all of life flows into and out of one another. Collected in: Sisters of the Earth: Women's Prose and Poetry About Nature by Lorraine Anderson

All six children disappointed their father [Edward White Benson]. Martin, the eldest, was a paragon: brilliant at school, quiet, pious - his father's dream, He stuttered, which may reflect the strain of such perfection under such parents. His death at age seventeen tore a hole in his father that never healed. Nellie tried to be the perfect daughter - working with the poor, caring for her parents, gentle, but always willing to go for a hard gallop with her father for morning exercise. Her death at a young age, unmarried, was for the whole family an afterthought to the awfulness of Martin's loss. Arthur, Fred, and Hugh all found the Anglican religion of their father impossible. Arthur went to church, appreciated the music, the ceremony and its role in social order, but struggled with belief, even when he called out to God in the despair of his blackest depression. Fred was flippant and disengaged, and his first novel, Dodo, the hit of the season in 1893, outraged his father's sense of seriousness. Fred represented Britain at figure skating - a hobby that was as far as he could get from his father's ideals of social and religious commitment, the epitome of a 'waste of time.' Hugh's turn to the Roman Catholic Church was after his father's death - but like all the children, the fight with paternal authority never ceased. While his father was alive, Hugh muffed exams, wanted to go into the Indian Civil Service against his father's wished - he failed those exams too 0 and argued with everyone in the family petulantly. Maggie, too, was 'difficult': 'her friendships were seldom leisurely or refreshing things,' commented Arthur; Nellie more acerbic, added, 'If Maggie would only have an intimate relationship even with a cat, it would be a relief.' Her Oxford tutors found her 'remorseless.' At age twenty-five, still single, she did not know the facts of life. Over the years, her jealousy of her mother's companion Lucy Tait became more and more pronounced, as did her adoption of her father's expressions of strict disapproval. Her depressions turned to madness and violence, leading to her eventual hospitalization. There is another dramatic narrative, then, of the six children, all differently and profoundly scarred by their home life, which they wrote about and thought about repeatedly. Cross-currents of competition between the children, marked by a desperate need for intimacy, in tension with a restraint born of fear of violent emotion and profound distrust (at best) of sexual feeling, produced a fervid and damaging family dynamic. There is a story her of what it is like to grow up with a hugely successful, domineering, morally certain father, a mother who embodied the joys of intimacy but with other women - and of what the costs of public success from such a complex background are.

Still and again, on the page, I smithereen the five-minute rule; I take my own damned time to stretch and look around. Because music is possible, I want music. Because I skated, I want ice and air for prose. Because plot bores me and knowing doesn’t, I write to find out what I know, or if I know, or if I might know sometime soon. “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end,” Virginia Woolf wrote, in “Modern Fiction.” She thought it, she said it, and at the hand press she and her husband called Hogarth, the press through which she published anything she pleased as she pleased (after her first two books), she sat with the weight of the words in her hands, the Caslon As and Bs and Cs, and letter by letter she chased haloes.

IT’S ONLY LIFE. WE ALL GET THROUGH IT. Not all of us complete the journey in the same condition. Along the way, some lose their legs or eyes in accidents or altercations, while others skate through the years with nothing worse to worry about than an occasional bad-hair day.

Anyway, to me he’s just Sunny. Come on up, Jacks, don’t be shy.” His eyes are wide, and he’s mouthing, “What the fuck?” At me while his friends shove him. “Sunny.” “What’s going on, Starlight?” His words are too quiet for the mic to pick up clearly. “You know I love you. I wouldn’t be here in this amazing city with this fantastic group of ladies if you hadn’t come crashing into my life. Literally.” His laugh has a nervous edge to it. “We might not seem like a perfect match from the outside, but somehow, we work. You make every single day a little lighter, a little more fun, and you drive me freaking insane sometimes.” He smirks. “But I love how you challenge me to be a better person. You make me whole. And so....” I scrabble in the waist pouch Jo passed to me after the bout. “Will you drive me crazy for the rest of our lives? Will you marry me, Jackson?” He leans into the mic. “Are you kidding me, Starlight? Way to steal my thunder.” “What?” I pull back. He reaches into the pocket of his jeans. “I was going to propose to you. I’ve been carrying this around for weeks. It was all planned out.” He pulls out a small grey velvet box. My chest shudders with laughter. “You always were too slow to keep up with me. Better get your skate coach to work on your speed.” “You like it when I take my time.” “Wait. So, is that a yes?” I shove at him to get a little distance. It’s entirely possible I could self combust if he doesn’t give me a bit of space. “No.” I gasp as he drops to one knee. “Starlight. You’re my world. That day I knocked you over at that shitty roller rink was the best day of my life. I say was, because every day I’ve gotten to have you in my life has been a little better, and the day I get to slide my ring on your finger to make it permanent. I can’t wait for that. So, Tasha Scar, will you marry me?” My smile spreads all the way up my face, his eyes falling to the dimple I’ve grown to appreciate. “Fine. But just remember. I asked first.

Everything I ever needed to know about life I learned from growing up skateboarding.

The first skate video I owned was a VHS copy of Future Primitive and it pretty much changed my life. I guess I was never really into team sports much, and skating really promoted individualism in a way that resonated with me.

Was it really a good thing, for example, to so dramatically liberalize the divorce laws in the 1960s? It’s not clear to me that the children whose lives were destabilized by the hypothetical freedom this attempt at liberation introduced would say so. Horror and terror lurk behind the walls provided so wisely by our ancestors. We tear them down at our peril. We skate, unconsciously, on thin ice, with deep, cold waters below, where unimaginable monsters lurk.

When you learn to ride a bike, ice skate, or downhill ski, the first thing you’re taught is how to stop. It’s an essential skill because if things start heading the wrong direction, you can stop and limit the damage. This same skill is necessary with conversations that have the potential to go off the rails and create lasting damage. When someone blindsides you and says something that triggers you, find the brakes, so you can hit that Pause button. This can be tricky because, by nature, we often aren’t patient communicators. We expect responses right away and feel compelled to offer the same. I’m inviting you to challenge that and request a little time to gather your thoughts. It can happen faster than you think, so I advise my clients to make simple requests that allow them to Pause. Some examples include: • Let me catch my breath here. • Can we find a place to sit down to talk about this? • Give me a moment to close my door. • Let me go to the bathroom/let the dog out/fill my coffee, and then I will give you my undivided attention. The truth is, your brain needs time to overcome some of your initial reactions and access other choices.

Bombs spewing like volcanoes, glass race tracks, hookin' u-bowl skate ramps, barrels beautiful and violent at the same time that fill us with waves of life straight from the source and the force of God in our veins when all of our fear and pain and joy pulse through us in waves as we reach for the light at the end of the tunnel. A fleeting moment we know we are alive. Every wave is a life on its own unique path... its own journey. The ride, man. And if we're lucky we're there for that final moment...looking into its soul.

Like most things in life, skating is far easier when you’re a man because nobody is picking you up and launching you across the room twice a day.

Sometimes you have to skate through life, sliding on the surface because it's too hard to feel. So you keep going. Keep busy. Fill the days, hours, and minutes, hoping to come out on the other side. Stopping to try to understand why causes too much pain.

I always thought that skating would be the most complicated commitment in my life. I was wrong.

No matter what the other fifty odd weeks of his life offered, here, at least for a few days, he was officially a very special person in an otherwise ordinary world.

You sure changed your tune mighty fast." Kane's hands were busily tugging his dress shirt from his slacks. His knuckles accidently brushed against Avery's throbbing hard-on causing him to screw his eyes shut as an all-consuming need coursed through his veins. He couldn't help but let out a groan as those same knuckles skated up and down his length again; this time, no doubt, with deliberate intent. Kane knew exactly how to push his buttons and bring his body to life. In a matter of seconds, his husband managed to get him out of his shirt, undo his pants, had his slacks pushed partway down his thighs, and had a hand down the front of his silk boxers.

Remember how we forgot? Once upon a time, we were young Our dreams hung like apples Waiting to be picked and peeled And hope was something needing to be reeled-in So we can fill the always empty big fish bin with the one that got away And proudly say that "this time, impossible is not an option" Because success is so akin to effort and opportunity they could be related So we took chances We figure skated on thin ice Believed that each slice of life was served with something sweet on the side And failure was never nearly as important as the fact that we tried That in the war against frailty and limitation We supplied the determination it takes to make ideas and goals the parents of Possibility And we believe ourselves to be members of this family Not just one branch on one tree But a forest whose roots make up a dynasty

The only course to pursue to make life bearable on such a day, at least for women (I speak not of men, considering their case hopeless, unless they skate), is, immediately after breakfast to draw a chair as close to the fire as a chair will go, without tumbling in, and to seat yourself upon it, with a book. By all means let the book be a shabby one as to outside, else your pleasure will be marred by alarms as to the warping of its fine back by the action of the fire. A shabby book then, either an old friend, whose worth you know well, having gauged it and measured its value on many a happy day before,—an old friend with turned down leaves, and dashes and pencil-marks, and, if you are sentimental, a sprig of some flower, so long dead as to be unrecognisable, between two pet pages,—or else, a stranger with a pleasant new face, whose acquaintance you are glad to make, and let agreeable, fresh ideas filter through your passively recipient mind from its open pages.

Workdays are, I imagine, rather like learning to ice-skate Torvill and Dean’s The Bolero. They start and end easily enough; it’s the bit in the middle that causes the pain in the arse.

There was a knock at the door. It was Lumiere. The Beast bade him enter. "Is there anything else you require tonight before retiring, master?" "I - I thought we might go skating tomorrow." Lumiere's eyebrows shot up. "Skating, master? You? You've never skated in your life!" "Belle mentioned that she has skated before. Back in her village. I thought she might like to try it here. How hard can it be?" "On the backside? Very," said Lumiere.

I knew you forever and you were always old, soft white lady of my heart. Surely you would scold me for sitting up late, reading your letters, as if these foreign postmarks were meant for me. You posted them first in London, wearing furs and a new dress in the winter of eighteen-ninety. I read how London is dull on Lord Mayor's Day, where you guided past groups of robbers, the sad holes of Whitechapel, clutching your pocketbook, on the way to Jack the Ripper dissecting his famous bones. This Wednesday in Berlin, you say, you will go to a bazaar at Bismarck's house. And I see you as a young girl in a good world still, writing three generations before mine. I try to reach into your page and breathe it back… but life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack. This is the sack of time your death vacates. How distant your are on your nickel-plated skates in the skating park in Berlin, gliding past me with your Count, while a military band plays a Strauss waltz. I loved you last, a pleated old lady with a crooked hand. Once you read Lohengrin and every goose hung high while you practiced castle life in Hanover. Tonight your letters reduce history to a guess. The count had a wife. You were the old maid aunt who lived with us. Tonight I read how the winter howled around the towers of Schloss Schwobber, how the tedious language grew in your jaw, how you loved the sound of the music of the rats tapping on the stone floors. When you were mine you wore an earphone. This is Wednesday, May 9th, near Lucerne, Switzerland, sixty-nine years ago. I learn your first climb up Mount San Salvatore; this is the rocky path, the hole in your shoes, the yankee girl, the iron interior of her sweet body. You let the Count choose your next climb. You went together, armed with alpine stocks, with ham sandwiches and seltzer wasser. You were not alarmed by the thick woods of briars and bushes, nor the rugged cliff, nor the first vertigo up over Lake Lucerne. The Count sweated with his coat off as you waded through top snow. He held your hand and kissed you. You rattled down on the train to catch a steam boat for home; or other postmarks: Paris, verona, Rome. This is Italy. You learn its mother tongue. I read how you walked on the Palatine among the ruins of the palace of the Caesars; alone in the Roman autumn, alone since July. When you were mine they wrapped you out of here with your best hat over your face. I cried because I was seventeen. I am older now. I read how your student ticket admitted you into the private chapel of the Vatican and how you cheered with the others, as we used to do on the fourth of July. One Wednesday in November you watched a balloon, painted like a silver abll, float up over the Forum, up over the lost emperors, to shiver its little modern cage in an occasional breeze. You worked your New England conscience out beside artisans, chestnut vendors and the devout. Tonight I will learn to love you twice; learn your first days, your mid-Victorian face. Tonight I will speak up and interrupt your letters, warning you that wars are coming, that the Count will die, that you will accept your America back to live like a prim thing on the farm in Maine. I tell you, you will come here, to the suburbs of Boston, to see the blue-nose world go drunk each night, to see the handsome children jitterbug, to feel your left ear close one Friday at Symphony. And I tell you, you will tip your boot feet out of that hall, rocking from its sour sound, out onto the crowded street, letting your spectacles fall and your hair net tangle as you stop passers-by to mumble your guilty love while your ears die.

My big takeaway was that you lace up your skates, you put on your helmet and you get on the ice knowing all the rules. If you get blindsided, that’s just part of it; if your teammate doesn’t pass to you and takes the shot himself, that’s the game, and if you lose 4–0, that’s the game too. You just go out there and do your best with what you’ve got.

So why did Sydney – a pretty girl, whose greatest enjoyments in life were sailing, visiting France and ice-skating, and who loved the parties and dancing she attended as a débutante – marry David, who was a countryman at heart, actively disliked meeting new people and regarded ‘abroad’ with suspicion and horror? There can be no other reason but that she fell in love with him. He was a kind man and he was very funny. He made her laugh and unquestionably loved her. Many successful marriages have been founded on less.

Anyone seeking to draw closer to God needs to curb the horizontal and ascend to God vertically,’ he said. ‘And this means giving oneself fully to God – with all one’s heart, body, mind and soul. There mustn’t be any dark corners.’ Skimming the surface wasn’t an option, he stressed. ‘People often tend to merely skate around the edges of religion, but what they really need is to plunge into its depths like deep-sea divers looking for treasures. Too many people nowadays make selective choices from various faiths – the New Age approach, but never embrace any one of them fully,’ said Nasr. It was true, so many people didn’t believe in organised religion but liked to take the best from every religion or spiritual teaching. ‘The most direct means of communication with God,’ he concluded, ‘are prayer and dhikr.

She was back on her skates, twirling expertly about the slippery surface of her life.

The Deliverator does not know for sure what happens to the driver in such cases, but he has heard some rumors. Most pizza deliveries happen in the evening hours, which Uncle Enzo considers to be his private time. And how would you feel if you bad to interrupt dinner with your family in order to call some obstreperous dork in a Burbclave and grovel for a late fucking pizza? Uncle Enzo has not put in fifty years serving his family and his country so that, at the age when most are playing golf and bobbling their granddaughters, he can get out of the bathtub dripping wet and lie down and kiss the feet of some sixteenyear- old skate punk whose pepperoni was thirty-one minutes in coming. Oh, God. It makes the Deliverator breathe a little shallower just to think of the idea. But he wouldn't drive for CosaNostra Pizza any other way. You know why? Because there's something about having your life on the line. It's like being a kamikaze pilot. Your mind is clear. Other people -- store clerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up Life in America -- other people just rely on plain old competition. Better flip your burgers or debug your subroutines faster and better than your high school classmate two blocks down the strip is flipping or debugging, because we're in competition with those guys, and people notice these things. What a fucking rat race that is. CosaNostra Pizza doesn't have any competition. Competition goes against the Mafia ethic. You don't work harder because you're competing against some identical operation down the street. You work harder because everything is on the line. Your name, your honor, your family, your life. Those burger flippers might have a better life expectancy -- but what kind of life is it anyway, you have to ask yourself. That's why nobody, not even the Nipponese, can move pizzas faster than CosaNostra. The Deliverator is proud to wear the uniform, proud to drive the car, proud to march up the front walks of innumerable Burbclave homes, a grim vision in ninja black, a pizza on his shoulder, red LED digits blazing proud numbers into the night: 12:32 or 15:15 or the occasional 20:43.

O wayfarer! Yearn finds quench, not in meadows, seashores or altitude of mountain peaks; but when being becomes dance.

So three days before the millennium, Bianca called. “D’ya wanna go to the White House with Trisha and me?” By Trisha, she meant country singer Trisha Yearwood, whose record label, MCA, she’d recently been hired to work at. “When would that be, exactly?” I asked. “For that Millennium Concert at the Lincoln Memorial. There’s a party at the White House after and all.” She always talked like she was chewing gum between words. “They’re flying us there in a private jet. Ya don’t need to write about it. Just come as Trisha’s guest. It’ll be fun.” “Shit, I’m supposed to go ice-skating with some guys who think the world’s going to end. Give me a day to figure things out and I’ll get right back to you.

NATURE MORTE You are given two things today, one is an angry nail in your side; Changing what you are able to sense is the second thing you are gifted. Nature is always a referred existence, writes Emerson, never a presence. Who knows where the time goes, sings Sandy Denny. Who can bear to hear it? One reaches the moment when one loses words—in the pastoral, in the cosmic? Think about the scars on the planets, & how patient those stars seem to be. I am painting the natural landscape with my eyes closed today. It is like writing A poem with all the cross-outs left in; an expression like never thought I’d see the day. Nature that begins with unknowable & ends with more monotonous hills. Today, I want to be the country-fried philosophe or a Hudson River School painting. When this life is over, describe to me how its concave & convex forms are & are not. We live amid surfaces, writes Emerson, & the true art of life is to skate well on them.

SpottieOttieDopaliscious [Hook] Damn damn damn James [Verse 1: Sleepy Brown] Dickie shorts and Lincoln's clean Leanin', checking out the scene Gangsta boys, blizzes lit Ridin' out, talkin' shit Nigga where you wanna go? You know the club don't close 'til four Let's party 'til we can't no more Watch out here come the folks (Damn - oh lord) [Verse 2: André 3000] As the plot thickens it gives me the dickens Reminiscent of Charles a lil' discotheque Nestled in the ghettos of Niggaville, USA Via Atlanta, Georgia a lil' spot where Young men and young women go to experience They first li'l taste of the night life Me? Well I've never been there; well perhaps once But I was so engulfed in the Olde E I never made it to the door you speak of, hardcore While the DJ sweatin' out all the problems And the troubles of the day While this fine bow-legged girl fine as all outdoors Lulls lukewarm lullabies in your left ear Competing with "Set it Off," in the right But it all blends perfectly let the liquor tell it "Hey hey look baby they playin' our song" And the crowd goes wild as if Holyfield has just won the fight But in actuality it's only about 3 A.M And three niggas just don' got hauled Off in the ambulance (sliced up) Two niggas don' start bustin' (wham wham) And one nigga don' took his shirt off talkin' 'bout "Now who else wanna fuck with Hollywood Courts?" It's just my interpretation of the situation [Hook] [Verse 3: Big Boi] Yes, when I first met my SpottieOttieDopalicious Angel I can remember that damn thing like yesterday The way she moved reminded me of a Brown Stallion Horse with skates on, ya know Smooth like a hot comb on nappy ass hair I walked up on her and was almost paralyzed Her neck was smelling sweeter Than a plate of yams with extra syrup Eyes beaming like four karats apiece just blindin' a nigga Felt like I chiefed a whole O of that Presidential My heart was beating so damn fast Never knowing this moment would bring another Life into this world Funny how shit come together sometimes (ya dig) One moment you frequent the booty clubs and The next four years you & somebody's daughter Raisin' y'all own young'n now that's a beautiful thang That's if you're on top of your game And man enough to handle real life situations (that is) Can't gamble feeding baby on that dope money Might not always be sufficient but the United Parcel Service & the people at the Post Office Didn't call you back because you had cloudy piss So now you back in the trap just that, trapped Go on and marinate on that for a minute

Behold, this is the joy of his way, and out of the earth shall others grow. —Job 8:19 (KJV) I often tell people that sometimes life is like Roller Derby: We may be skating along at the back of the pack, until God grabs our hands and whips us to the front to score. But sitting on a plane departing Atlanta for Kansas City, I was discouraged. I had been hard at work on a project that I thought would take six months to complete. Six months stretched to two years and then five. The more I worked, the further behind I was. The flight attendant interrupted my thoughts: “We will be taking off as soon as our last few passengers arrive.” When a young woman slid into the seat beside me, I glanced at her and the other interesting-looking last-minute boarders. Two words popped into my brain: Roller Derby! “Hi,” I said to my seatmate. “Are you all some sort of team?” She nodded. “We play for the Kansas City Roller Warriors.” I giggled as I recalled Roller Derby matches I’d watched on TV as a child. I rejoiced thinking that I sat in the presence of roller-skating angels, living reenactors of the metaphor I used to encourage others. I chuckled. Life is like Roller Derby. I am never so behind that God cannot reach down His mighty hand and whip me forward. God, thank You for making me smile. When I feel frustrated or too far behind, help me to remember Your Roller Derby angels. —Sharon Foster Digging Deeper: Prv 17:22; Phil 4:4

A long time ago inside a local ice rink, 15 year olds went to battle to win a game of hockey.  They played for themselves, for their teams, for their coaches, for their towns, and for their families. It was a 0-0 tie in the 2nd period.     Both goalies were outstanding.  But one appeared to be somewhere else. Thinking.  The shot came.    The antagonist wasn’t aiming to break the scoreless tie.  He was living up to his agreement with the other team’s coach.  A coach who wanted his son to be the team's goalie.     He didn’t want a new goalie that could take his team where they have never been.  The playoffs.  A goalie that could secure his team at the top.  The coach watched the shot he bought.      The goalie could have shifted, dodged out of the way, but he was paralyzed.  He dropped to the ice when the puck struck his unprotected neck.     The player skated over to examine the goalie. He had accomplished his task.    And with the money he earned, he can buy the bicycle he always wanted.     The goalie’s father was standing amongst the other parents.  He was enraged that his son didn’t make the save.     He felt the hard work he put into his boy slowly fade, and quickly die out.  He knew how good his son was, and would be.  He knew the puck struck because the goalie let it.  He did not know why.   I groaned as the puck hit me in the arm.  I had pads, but pads can only soften the blow. I squeezed my arm.     My father stood and watched.     My friend fired another shot that whacked me in the throat, knocking me down.  I felt dizzy.      It was frigid on the pond in winter.     This is where I learned to play hockey.  This is also where I learned it was painful to be a goaltender.  I got up slowly, glowering at him.  My friend was perplexed at my tenacity.     “This time, stay down!” And then he took the hardest slap shot I have ever encountered.     The puck tore through the icy air at incredible speed right into my face.     My glove rapidly came up and snatched it right before it would shatter my jaw.  I took my glove off and reached for the puck inside.     I swung my arm and pitched it as fiercely as I could at my friend.     Next time we play, I should wear my mask and he should wear a little more cover than a hat.  I turned towards my father.  He was smiling.  That was rare.     I was relieved to know that I was getting better and he knew it.  The ice cracked open and I dropped through…      The goalie was alone at the hospital.  He got up and opened the curtains the nurse keeps closing at night so he could see through the clear wall.     He eyed out the window and there was nothing interesting except a lonely little tree.  He noticed the way the moonlight shined off the grass and radiated everything else.  But not the tree.  The tree was as colourless as the sky.     But the sky had lots of bright little glowing stars.  What did the tree have?  He went back to his bed and dozed off before he could answer his own question.   Nobody came to visit him at the hospital but his mother.     His father was at home and upset that his son is no longer on the team.  The goalie spot was seized by the team’s original goalie, the coach’s son.     The goalie’s entire life had been hockey.  He played every day as his father observed.  He really wanted a regular father, whatever that was.  A father that cares about him and not about hockey.  The goalie did like hockey, but it was a game.         A sport just like other sports, only there’s an ice surface to play on.  But he did not love hockey.     It was just something he became very good at, with plenty of practice and bruises.     He was silent in his new team’s locker room, so he didn’t assume anyone would come and see how he was doing.

O wayfarer! Yearn finds quench, not in meadows, seashores or altitude of mountain peaks; but when being and dance are one.

If I could, I would ask the world to make me skates so that I could find its frozen water and set myself free to smile, laugh, dance and cheer. I'd see the boundaries that would be in a world frozen in its place and they would keep me safe, away from where the waters warm, away from the stares, away from the thoughts that melt and tear. I would ask the world to skate with me, looking at the gladness I had found, knowing, really knowing, there was nothing left to fear. I think then we would be free to live life as we could, with more in common than apart, the fog would lift, the confusion would end and true understanding would hold us dear.

We enter crack houses and foster houses, group homes and strip clubs, trailers, mansions, split levels, ramblers, ramshackles, bungalows, old houses, new houses, brick, vinyl, aluminum, wood. We enter bars, temples, bowling alleys, churches, skating rinks, doctor’s offices, jails, barges, fields, factories, stores, gas stations, laundromats, cars, woods, bushes, Walmart, Target, Dillard’s. Buses, apartments, malls, schools, studios. Tonight, we enter the country

Imagination comes alive when skates scar the ice to tell fairy tales.

Gliding in the bowl, all that noise and power falling down on you, the ice trembling beneath your skates, the shouts quaking your bones. The echo of that rumbles inside you for the rest of your life. I’d played on hometown favorite teams, and I’d seen arenas jumping, but I had never felt it like this.

CONCLUSION The Mexican Revolution was a ten-year Iliad, in which Villa, Zapata, Obregón, Carranza and the others played the roles in fact which were played in myth by Agamemnon, Achilles, Hector and Aeneas. The loss of life was frightful as the ever-widening spirals of bloodshed sucked in more and more people. Historians estimate the death toll at anything between a low of 350,000 and a high of 1,000,000, but this excludes the victims of the 1918 flu epidemic, which adds another 300,000 to the list of fatalities. Civilisation’s thin veneer was never thinner than in the Mexican Revolution, and the moral is surely that even in advanced societies we skate all the time on the thinnest of ice. A seemingly trivial political crisis can open up the ravening maw of an underworld of chaos.

And no, this story does not end with her winning any championship medals. It doesn’t have to. In fact, this story does not end at all, because Susan is still figure skating several mornings a week—simply because skating is still the best way for her to unfold a certain beauty and transcendence within her life that she cannot seem to access in any other manner.

A fleet of restored vintage trolleys ran from the West Village to Downtown. They had adorable names like Rosie, Betty, Petunia, and the Green Dragon. They dinged cheerfully down the green median of a cobblestone path. Griffin took a few shots of Megan and Josh in front of the Green Dragon before we all climbed aboard. As we looped around the neighborhood, I looked out the window and felt the breeze on my face. The West Village was a great cross section of urban Dallas life. Yuppies, families, and empty nesters commingled on the streets. Most days a breeze blew down the corridor, making it bearable, even enjoyable, to sit outside the cafés year-round. A dog-friendly café with an adjoining dog park was down the block, and a parade of pups dripped down the street, tails wagging, sopping wet from doggie pools. A couple on roller skates did tricks for pedestrians before they skated away, hand in hand. It felt vibrant and magical. Homey.

Like most things in life, skating is far easier when you're a man...

Nothing was better than being on the ice. Nothing. The way his skin went tight when the cold hit it, the crunch beneath his skates, the sounds: laughter, pucks colliding with the glass, pinging off the goalposts, the Zamboni rumbling to life. He even loved the smell.

All of them skated through life making choices that could be swept away and tidied up with incomprehensible ease simply because of who they were.

Years of pain have taught me that if you want to know Christ deeply—not skating the surface but intimately—it will mean journeying through deep suffering. Think of it: When Jesus gave you his most amazing, life-transforming display of love; when he showed you the height, depth, and breadth of that love; when he withheld nothing but wrung himself inside out to death, pouring out all of his love to the last drop…it happened on a torturous cross, his greatest point of horror and anguish. It seems then that if we are to know Jesus in an intimate way, it will take place in our own points of horror and anguish.

Maybe the best way to hold on to her wasn’t to obsess over her paintings or wear her skates or listen to her music or copy her style or worry over what would happen when I finally lost Peanut. Maybe the best way to keep her with me was to embrace her spirit. To emulate her courage. To bring the warmth and love to the world that she always—fearlessly—had. She had loved us without reservation. She adored us wildly. And laughed. And danced. And soaked it all up—every atom of her life—every moment of her time She felt it all. She lived it all. That’s what I loved about her. Not just that she was a great mom or a great wife or a great dog rescuer. She was a great person. She knew some divine secret about how to open up to being alive that the rest of us kept stubbornly missing. She’d wanted me to know it, too. She’d wanted me to say yes to everything. She’d wanted me to go all in.

the foster-to-adopt experience is not one of those times where trying to skate by with a bare minimum of knowledge is going to cut it. There are just too many decisions, too many forks in the road, too many implications to not be on top of your game. And really, this is probably one thing in life where you DO want to be on top of your game. It’s a crazy enough situation when you know what you’re doing! Not having an understanding of the system, the politics, or the twists and turns would be maddening at least and at most, could result in you making a bad decision or a mistake that has long term consequences on your life and the life of your child. So I hate to break it to you if you thought you’d picked up your last textbook back in school, but there are several steps along the way where you’ll need to do some research in order to ensure that things go as smoothly as possible.

Dylan watched her with a sly smile as he skated backward toward the playoff circle. She wished he’d trip or bump into someone and knock the smug expression off his face, but no luck. Mr. Charmed Life was error-proof on skates. Must be nice.

To Coach Brantford, I could do almost nothing right. He told me that I didn’t play tough enough, I didn’t hit anybody and that my skating and passing needed a lot of work. If you came to a practice or a game, you’d have never known that I scored 25 goals & had 39 assists what with Coach Brantford always harping on me about something I was doing wrong.

If you would have asked the coach if he’d like to have a team of players like me, skilled guys who could skate, pass and shoot, play hard, but clean or a team full of players like Billy, who weren’t the most skilled, but who would intimidate and attempt to put an opponent through the boards, he tell you in a nanosecond he’d want a team full of “Billys.

I always loved the sounds you’d hear at a practice. The silence in the cold rink, no one in the stands and then as the guys skated around, you could hear the blades crunching into the ice. When I would step on the ice for a practice, game or even a public skate, the second I heard that sound of ice meeting metal, I’d smile.

As you comply to the Holy Spirit’s leading, you will gain a greater understanding of what I have already worked out for you. I will not deceive you. Take My hand and allow Me to walk you through the valley of death. You will fear no evil for knowing with assurance that your hand is in My hand. I have gone before you and saw the enemy’s plan—and the way of escape. The enemy will not see you coming; you will catch him off course even when he tries to catch you slipping. Know, My child, that I have your footing and you will not slip or fall on the ice rink of life. I will skate with you, and together we will become a great partnership to success. I have given you authority and graced you with power to resist the enemy of your purpose and he will run from you. The devil only recognizes authentic authority. Give voice to that which I have placed within you. Tell sickness to flee today, disease to flee today, poverty to flee today, demon spirits to flee today.

Bagehot had warned about the perils of low interest rates since at least the early 1850s. "John Bull," as he advised the readers of the Inquirer, quoting but not naming himself, "can stand a great deal, but he cannot stand 2 percent." He pressed on: "People won't take 2 percent; they won't bear a loss of income. Instead of that dreadful event, they invest their careful savings in something impossible - a canal to Kamchatka, a railway to Watchet, a plan for animating the Dead Sea, a corporation for shipping skates to the Torrid Zone." In 1867, with the Bank of England's discount rate quoted at 2 percent on the button, savers invested their careful savings across the seas. Bagehot anticipated the consequences of the coming bond bubble almost before it began to inflate.

Most businesses have the goal of getting as big as possible. Supreme, on the other hand, strives to remain underground and boutique, growing only when they deem it will enhance the brand. As style writer Glenn O’Brien put it, “Supreme is a company that refuses to sell out.” But why? Well, first off, because it wouldn’t be authentic to who they are, what they do, and what they’re into. For instance, when asked why they wouldn’t expand into women’s wear, Jebbia simply replied, “It’s not what we know.” And that’s all they’ve done—manifest an authentic reflection of their core beliefs with unyielding discipline. Supreme is a reflection of Jebbia’s life experiences and pas- sions. It just happened that his passion for “cool and unusual things for young people” was in harmony with the global youth movement that his brand has come to represent. Supreme continues to succeed on a massive scale because they have the discipline to focus their resources on creating great products rather than over-expanding. Or, as Jebbia puts it, “Staying true to what you do best has played a major role in our longevity. I would like people to see that we’re a small, independent skate company that has done our own thing, in our own way, over many years, and will hopefully continue to do so.

Tracy Chapman’s music is a reflection of her life experiences, her purpose. Ian Schrager’s hotels are a reflection of his life experiences, his purpose. And Supreme’s hats and skate decks are a reflection of James Jebbia’s dreams and desires. Each of them took their own experiences—the ups, the downs, the good and the bad—and turned them into something sharable, a real-world reflection of themselves. And because it combined their purpose with their singular talent, it flourished.

Derek Boogaard did not have to fight. This time, all he had to do was skate onto the ice. He could keep his thickly padded gloves on his hands, rather than theatrically flick them aside. he did not have to curl his mangled fingers into fists and raise them with malicious intent. Instead of dropping his stick, he could hold on to it with two hands as if he intended to scramble for the puck and shoot it into the net, just like all the other players, just as did as a boy.

Her house was built on a foundation of sand. The ice she was skating on was simply too thin. She fell through, into the water below, and is drowning.

It is crucial for you to understand what meditation is. It is not some special posture, and it’s not just a set of mental exercises. Meditation is the cultivation of mindfulness and the application of that mindfulness once cultivated. You do not have to sit to meditate. You can meditate while washing the dishes. You can meditate in the shower, or roller skating, or typing letters. Meditation is awareness, and it must be applied to each and every activity of one’s life. This isn’t easy.

“You’re staying with me?” I ask, surprised. “You can go back to the skate park, Ry. I’m fine here.” “Nah. Rem and Ry for life, remember?” he says, bumping my fist with his and finishing the secret handshake we made up a few years back. “Thank you. For everything.” “It’s no big deal." But it was to me. That’s the real Ryan. Fiercely loyal and scary as hell.

What does such a place look like? you wonder. First of all, a beautiful river winds through the town. Burbling cheerfully in the summer months, the river slows to a statelier pace in autumn. It freezes over in winter, and the residents of Shady Hollow host skating parties and build snow critters all along the banks. Even the creatures prone to hibernation cannot resist the lure of such icy enchantments in this place! And in spring, the river rushes back to life, nearly overflowing its banks after swelling with snowmelt and seasonal rains.

Heath's words echoed in my mind: all you care about is winning. He was right: that's who I was. But it wasn't who I'd always been. It was who I'd become, after a lifetime spent striving to be just like Sheila Lin. Like her, I'd discarded my past, my home, my family. I'd convinced myself if I became the best, it didn't matter who I hurt, because in the end, it would be worth it. Even if I hurt myself most of all. For all the years I'd spent obsessing about Sheila - first watching her on television, then skating for her, pushing myself to extremes for crumbs of praise - I'd never truly seen her. Not until that night, drinking in the dark in a Vancouver hotel room. And all I saw was misery. You can always be better, she'd said to me when we first met. But what was the point if you had everything and enjoyed nothing? Sheila's whole life had been spent grasping for more - more medals, more money, more power - and it would never be enough. Nothing's ever enough for you, Heath had said. He was wrong about that. I'd finally had enough, of the striving and the pain and the heartbreak. I didn't want to be Sheila Lin anymore. I didn't want to be Katarina Shaw either. I wanted to disappear.

Maybe she wasn’t skating so expertly over life as she thought. She was making lots of tiny mistakes that would eventually cause everything to fall apart.

Spend a few hours with your eyes skating over pages of happiness, all while the more serious bits of your life get to rest their legs. Take a break. Laugh your heart to healing, I like to say. Now there’s a tagline. Because laughter is a part of life too, isn’t it? Something not to be dismissed as it stands side by side with more serious matters of growth and grief.

In another person such an attitude might have seemed opportunistic, even cynical. Although Franklin was not cynical, it is true that few opportunities escaped him. Yet his attitude toward journalism honestly reflected his personality, to wit, his innate skepticism. No argument ever so convinced him as to preclude his entertaining the opposite. Many people find uncertainty unsettling and insist on definite answers to the large and small questions of life. Franklin was just the opposite, being of that less numerous tribe that finds certainty—or certitude, rather—unsettling. Doubtless this reflected, at least in part, his experience of the stifling certitude of the Mathers in Boston. It also reflected his wide, and ever-widening, reading, which exposed him to multiple viewpoints. Above all, it probably reflected something innate: an equipoise that nearly everyone who knew him noticed and that many remarked upon. It could make him seem smug or shallow; while others agonized upon life’s deep issues, Franklin contented himself with incomplete answers, maintaining an open mind and seeming to skate upon life’s surface.

As the Great Gretzky said in another context, you have to skate to where the puck will be, not where it is.

I guess you Da Man now, Filthy, JB says. And for the first time in my life I don’t want to be. I bet the dishes you miss number fifty, he says, walking away. Where’s he going? Hey, I shout. We Da Man. And when he turns around I toss him the ball. He dribbles back to the top of the key, fixes his eyes on the goal. I watch the ball leave his hands like a bird up high, skating the sky, crossing over us.

For a long time, I thought I wouldn’t know what to do without hockey in my life, and now I have it figured out. I have a new purpose besides the sport I love. Something bigger and more important than hitting a puck and lacing up my skates. I can have two favorite things, because it involves proving to Lexi every goddamn day she’s worthy of being treated right, worthy of being told she’s special and brilliant and beautiful, and I won’t stop until there’s not an ounce of doubt in her mind that she’s one in eight billion. One of a kind, my favorite person, and the woman I’m falling in love with.

I’m going to get him skating again,” I whisper to Piper and Emmy. “Lex, I don’t⁠—” “Hockey is his whole life.” I stare at the doors leading to the patient rooms. “I’ll work with him. We’ll do it together.” I’ve always been a determined bitch. Once I put my mind to something, I don’t stop until it happens, and I’ll be damned if Riley goes down without a fight.

The natural course of my skating career, of my painting career, of my life, has always been to run against the current. If others are going downstream, I’m going upstream, leaping over waterfalls... That is the nature of the beast within me. If people think that I do it for effect, the truth, on the contrary, is that I’m following - and always have - my natural inclination.

Edwards. I don’t know why I’ve been cursed with sitting through this dinner with one of you knuckleheads—I assume I ran over a unicorn or set fire to an orphanage in a past life—but if you act like an idiot tonight I’m going to have you doing bag skates every day until graduation.

It’s my unique challenge, keeping my books light as a feather while still conveying a meaningful message and not, now to quote Amelia, “all the super-boring stuff” that weighs people down. Rom-com, unlike my Water Under the Bridge, is unique in that sense. Laugh and fall in love and resolve some of your existential crisis while you go. Spend a few hours with your eyes skating over pages of happiness, all while the more serious bits of your life get to rest their legs. Take a break. Laugh your heart to healing, I like to say. Now there’s a tagline. Because laughter is a part of life too, isn’t it? Something not to be dismissed as it stands side by side with more serious matters of growth and grief.