You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'small town happenings' category.
It would be the last of the great snows for a long time to come. One foot is fairly a good deal of snow. However, its perhaps the closest that I will get to a desert! White sand. It rarely gets a literal as that! If you haven’t seen or played in a lot of snow, I can tell you the obvious- its cold. Its also quite fluffy and good fun to dunk people in. Frost bites are rather painful and have to be dealt with in ingenious ways. In a cold place, keep in mind, never get your socks wet. Unfortunately the paradox of spending prolonged periods of time in the snow with dry socks is quite a paradox. Such randomness in guidelines. Such randomness in thought. The memories seem to rush past with every passing moment. The present and the past have little distinction but depend on where I draw the line. The snow makes things rather blurry. I wonder what tomorrow holds. Thats the future? That one is clearly a whole new ball game!
I finally made it to the ice skating arena. Yes, it was the day when I would face my nemesis. Its funny to go to the rink for the first time. When I was younger i always thought that these kind of things could only exist when it snowed. The placid images of people whizzing past former lakes was rather vivid in my mind. But then how did people skate in summer? Were the arenas made of a special fabric that imitated the properties of ice? Anyway, strange as it may seem, I was quite consoled to see that an ice arena really had ice on it!
The first steps are truly the hardest. The ritual of wearing the skates and going through a rather complicated knotting procedure is immensely tiring. And finally onto the ice! With great trepidation I took my first steps. It wasn’t as cold as I had imagined it to be and probably that was because I hadn’t had my first fall. There was this huge wave of nostalgia that came crashing into my thoughts. I went back to the days when I first began to walk. Though I remember nothing of it, it seems to me that the experience must have been something of this sort. It was a feeling of fear and excitement. The feeling that gliding on the ice would somehow set me free. I was no longer constrained by the laws of physics to walk at 5 miles an hour and I could perhaps fly like the wind. My biggest inspiration on the rink were the little kids, not more than seven or eight years who didnt care about falling and with a huge beaming smile lifted themselves up, everytime it happened. I thought to myself that if the experience of skating was like walking for the first time, maybe the little ones were more familair with that sort of thing.
Anyways I loved the whole idea so much that the next day i got myself a pair of skates. Flying is around the corner and I cant wait to get my feet off the ground!
