BLOOMSDAY 2021

Confucius once said: “Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” My guess is that Confucius never skated on ice.

I understand many of the quirks of Canadian culture. Poutine makes complete sense to me - a hearty meal based on function over form. Milk in a bag, hard to justify but I understand the concept. But the human desire to skate makes no sense. Surely it’s not just me that thinks there’s something unnatural about balancing on knives attached to the soles of my feet….for fun!

That being said, early in my first Canadian winter, I accepted the reality that I would have to deflect attention away from my frozen bone marrow and eke SOME goodness from the perpetual cold. Having heard from so many people about the unique experience of skating on the Rideau Canal – and having been brought up thinking that to walk on water was an achievement of messianic proportions – I decided to invest in a pair of skates and throw myself at it.

Well throw myself I did, mainly in a graceless hurtling motion toward the ice. It’s extremely hard to articulate the sense of unease when you first stand up in a pair of skates. My first time involved ambling down to the canal and mindlessly sitting down like everyone else on the benches to begin the process of strapping my skates on tightly. So far, so good. It was only when my body instinctively began to stand up that I realised I hadn’t thought this through. I assure you dear reader that it is not for comic effect that I tell you my first experience of standing up on skates resulted in a swift ego-obliterating fall forward and a terse meeting of bench and jaw.

Having undertaken to never again experience the public derision of that first foray (there was no derision to my face of course, but I could tell instinctively there were multiple derision-fests happening all over Ottawa that night), I decided to teach myself to skate under the cover of darkness. Luckily, the neighbourhood ice rink had me covered. As soon as the last of the child-Gretsky’s retired for the evening, that rink became my colosseum, and I was the gladiator. Assuming the roles of the man-eating tigers on chains were: my natural imbalance, inherent fear, and gravity.

George Bernard Shaw said that “A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself.” Never a truer word spoken. It may have looked clownish, but if you could have heard the montage music playing in my mind, you’d have known this was an arena of life or death. It suffices to say that, although I’ve never scaled Everest, I now know the mental fortitude necessary.

That was the first winter, and with the second now safely under my belt, I can at least point to progress. The jaw has healed, the ego less so, but the constant threat of obliteration for every second spent on the ice has given my winters a whole new lease of life. I won’t say I’ve perfected it – this year’s socially-distanced looks of abject sympathy from passing strangers as I lay in a heap on the ice attest to that – but my fear has abated, and where I once saw terror on the ice, I now see challenge.

It still makes no sense to me, but I’ve surrendered my allegiance to logic and good sense, and my winters have been all the better for it.