“Skating” – Vince Guaraldi

One of my favorite things about this time of year is the music. A lot of my favorite music is Christmas themed and you simply cannot listen to it in July. Also, a lot of the music is simple enough that even I can play it on piano. I have an extensive collection of Christmas music. There is a lot of great, interesting, bizarre and not so great stuff that doesn’t always get played on the mainstream “Christmas” radio stations. For the next 30 days let’s take a look at some of the less traditional work in this genre.

In this series I’m trying to focus on some of the less heard songs of the Holiday season and I know, I know, everybody reading this blog (and every other blog) owns Vince Guaraldi’s CD form “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”  I doubt there is anyone born after 1960 that doesn’t try to play the bass line from “Linus and Lucy” from this album within a few weeks of starting piano lessons.  This is a very, very popular Christmas album and every song on it is a gem.  The Vince Guaraldi trio knocked it way, way out of the park with this one.

But how often have you listened to the song, “Skating?”  It’s a wonderful, beautiful song…

One of the reasons I like jazz is it can say so much without words, and like art, jazz can express more than words.  This song IS “Skating.”  We didn’t have ponds where I grew up, but in winter the firemen would pour water on the baseball fields and make rinks for us kids.  Whether you’re on a rink or a pond this song is what skating outside, on a cold, winter night feels like.  Listen to the counter balance of grace in the verse and struggle in the bridge to this song.  You can hear the snow flakes fall.  You can hear the cold.  You can hear the joy, and the apprehension.  I couldn’t find the original from the movie, with the full length song.  This video gets a little silly after a few minutes, but you at least get a feel for the song.

I love to ice skate.  Except for a few times as a kid each winter, in my sister’s borrowed figure skates, I didn’t come to it until in my 30s, but it is one of my favorite activities.  On Thanksgiving evening we Fireflies were visiting family in Chicago and I took the two youngest (a son and daughter) Fireflies on the Grant Park rink.  My son had it down pretty well, he hasn’t been too often, but he is our skateboarder, rip-sticker, daredevil, so he was just fine.  My daughter still needed a little help, and, frankly, I was happy she did.

I don’t know if there is any athletic activity a parent can do with a child that is more exemplary a tiny allegory of what parenting is.  If you hold them too much they take short, choppy steps and they don’t learn the gliding motion they need.  If you let go too soon they’ll fall, and that ice is hard; they could literally split their head open.  Try holding them on just one side and they’re off balance.  And above all, you can never let them know just how concerned you are that they will fall.  You have to remain calm and natural, no matter how much panic is roiling in your gut, or they will sense your panic and give up.  And helping hurts!  You have to hold your back at awkward angles, you have to bend your knees low to stay at their level, but you can’t let them see you struggle, you have to make it look easy, and natural.

Then, as they get a little better you have to start letting them go for short burts on their own, always there and ready to catch them, but not letting them know you are so close, or that you even imagine they might fall.  And then they make a mistake, hit a skate blade toe on the ice when lifting a foot, and they lose their balance and they start making choppy steps, trying to recover and you have a split second to decide if they will be able to catch themselves of if you have to swoop in.  Because they need to learn that too.  They need to learn how to catch themselves and if you always swoop in too soon they never will.  And there is always the chance that they’ll be going along fine and fall backwards in a split second, without warning.

I’d been working a bit on rollerblading with this, the Littlest of the Fireflies, last summer so she was close to soloing when we stepped on the ice.  (After a few outings with me on rollerblades she gave it a try when I wasn’t home and fell and broke her arm.  Mrs. Firefly was really grateful that I had started her on this new hobby!  I forget what Mrs. Firefly wrote on the cast but it had something to do with it needing to be really, really cold in Hades before she’d be allowed to do any sports with Dad again.)  She needed me to be right behind her, holding on both sides at first, until she realized it wasn’t that different from rollerblading.  Before we even made it half way around we were just holding hands.  After a few laps of that I knew I needed to let go, but she didn’t.  So I pushed off and spun around backwards, looking at her as she came towards me.  She was scared and mad at me for letting go, but I laughed and teased her, so she wouldn’t be tempted to ask me to hold her; “What do you mean hold you?  Look at me, I’m doing it backwards, surely you don’t need help to skate forwards…”  All the time ready to dive between her and the ice if one of those awkward missteps led to a loss of balance she couldn’t recover from.  After about 15 minutes of that it was time to make an excuse to teach something to her brother so she’d be forced to fend for herself for a few laps.  Of course, even when on the other side of the rink with her brother my eye was never off her (except when I saw her looking for me), ready to bolt to her side should she fall (and the folks between me and her had better brace themselves for some checking, because I wasn’t going to take the long way to get to her).

She did great!  The next time we hit the ice she’ll take to it like a duck to water and she won’t need or want me anywhere near her and I’ll wonder why I didn’t take just one more lap with her before letting go of her hand last month.

Now, if you’ll excuse me some dust seems to have fallen in my eye and I’m having a hard time seeing the keys.

(This is a repost from last year. For those who are curious, I took her skating last week and my prediction was right. After a full Summer of rollerblading she didn’t need me at all on the ice. She was even skating backwards, laughing at me. No better microcosm of what parenting is. Take your kids ice skating this year!)

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