On Ice

I don’t quite know how this happened, but I managed to grow up in a sports-obsessed house without ever really learning to ice skate.

Actually, I do know how it happened. Even as a kid I had the kind of morbid fear of public failure that stopped me from learning new things. Once I’d decided that I wasn’t going to be any good at something (and usually that meant at least as good as my friends) there was no way I was even going to try it.

I’ve managed to make it a few decades without ever really feeling like I’ve been missing anything because I can’t skate. But now that’s over. My five-year-old son is learning to skate, and he’s been going to the weekly open skates at the local rink with his mother, who is an excellent skater. Now I want to skate, too.

I think this qualifies as some kind of irony: I spend half my time asking my too-careful boy to take a few chances, not be afraid to fail. But I can’t skate with him because when I was a boy I was afraid to fail.

In the February 19 issue of New York magazine, Po Bronson
writes about kids who are addicted to success, afraid to fail. One of the perils of praising your kid’s achievements, according to the piece, is that they may come to so crave that praise that they won’t want to risk failure. “When we praise children for their intelligence,” one educator says, “we tell them that is the name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.”

So in the name of enlightened parenting, I have been out making an ass of myself on the frozen pond in our neighborhood for the last few weeks, trying to teach myself to skate. I went to Play It Again Sports, bought a pair of used hockey skates and started wobbling around on the ice on my own. After a few times out, I got to the point were I could perform an activity that might charitably be called “skating.”

The next day I took my son and my wife down to the pond with me. We had our street hockey sticks with us and a puck and everything, but my boy had a bad day. It was about ten degrees out and just trying to walk in his skates the ten yards from the changing house to the pond took all the wind out of his sails. I think it was after his second fall that he announced that he was ready to go home.

We did eventually get him out onto the ice, and he did have a pretty good time getting down on his hands and knees trying to see how deep down into the pond he could see. But he just wasn’t up for skating much that day, I guess. And so when I tried to encourage him, I heard myself saying, “C’mon, just try, that’s all we ask you to do.”

I suppose that's an example of asking your kid to do as you say, not as you did.

I could have told him that if he didn’t make the effort now, he might find himself decades later wishing he had. But I suppose he’ll have to find that out for himself.

Supporting Your Police

In honor of the Police reunion on the Grammys last night, I dug out my old LP copy of "Zenyatta Mondatta," recently rescued from my mother’s basement. It was in a box full of LPs, records that I hadn’t seen or thought about in decades. Going through that box was a wince-making experience. Does anything make a person question his own discernment more than rummaging through an old record collection?

Jean-Luc Ponty? What was I thinking?

We still listen to a lot of LPs in our house, but I don’t think Zenyatta is going to find its way into the regular rotation. Still, it’s nice to know that if I ever need to hear “Canary in a Coal Mine,” it’s at my fingertips.

Bumping Into Adam Gopnik

Adam Gopnik’s “Bumping into Mr. Ravioli” and “Man Goes to See a Doctor” are among the most masterful essays I’ve read. I know people who find Gopnik’s work charming and funny and insightful, and others who think he’s cloying and precious and pretentious. James Wolcott, in the New Republic, appears to belong to the second group. He wonders “if Adam Gopnik was put on this earth to annoy.”

Better Parenting Through Dodgeball

Woke up yesterday to learn that the temperature was -14 and that my son’s school was closed for the day. Stuck inside because of the cold, we ended up playing dodgeball in the family room.

This sort of thing has become disturbingly typical for me.

Before I became a father, I thought that fatherhood would turn me into some wiser, more mature, more loving version of myself. What it has really done is given me a lot of excuses to act like a five-year-old. There aren’t many days when I’m not, in the name of fatherhood, binging on breakfast cereal or playing wiffle ball or watching Sponge Bob.

The fact is that now that I am a father I act more like a child than I ever did when I actually was a child.

I can’t say I’m entirely proud of this. I know that there are certain behaviors expected of responsible parents, and I know that living-room dodgeball is not among them.

I also know that my own father managed to be an involved, loving dad without ever letting me forget who was the kid and who was the adult. These are all excellent arguments for a more dignified and reasonable style of parenting.

On the other hand, how many times do you get the chance to play dodgeball in the living room?

Speed Reading

My five-year-old son started reading when he was two, and when he reads aloud now, he likes to readjustasfastashepossiblycan. I don’t know if he’s showing off, or just enjoying the thrill of discovering his own abilities. Maybe his speed-reading is the brainiac equivalent of flexing and posing.

In any case, Lindsay Waters of Harvard University Press writes in the Feb. 9 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education about the dangers of reading too fast and too soon: “In departments of education, professors talk about the ‘fluency’ that those who are learning to read need to achieve to become good readers,” she writes. “Unless one can digest the letters on the page fast enough, one cannot comprehend what one is reading. But once one learns how to read, there is a speed beyond which one stops reading in a truly effective way. I am convinced that most speed-reading is impaired reading, just like the sort you do when you have a fever or are tired or engaged in other tasks at the same time you are supposed to be reading. Unless you are very smart, speed-reading forces you to ignore all but one dimension of a literary work, the simplest information. What we lose is the enjoyment that made people turn to literature in the first place.”

I’ll try that argument on my kid and see what he thinks.

Lobbyists

My tour of depressing wireless hot spots continued this morning, with a stop at a local Holiday Inn lobby. No matter how many times I am disappointed, I still expect hotel lobbies to be glamorous places filled with attractive people on their way to do important things. This fallacy must be based on repeat viewings of “North by Northwest,” in which Cary Grant tracks Eva Marie Saint through the lobby of the Ambassador East.

Sadly, neither of them showed up at the Holiday Inn this morning.

There was, however, a couple having a fight over the young man’s failure to help the young woman with her luggage. Accused of laziness and a lack of consideration, he fired back by calling her “a dumbass.”

Clearly, sir, you are a man of wit.

Oh, and the coffee was bad, too. Tomorrow, I may try the Greyhound station.

The Pride and Joy of Illinois

A special, pre-Super Bowl visit to the archives: The Colts’ infamous late-night move from Baltimore to Indianapolis 23 years ago is still pretty fresh in the minds of fans, especially in Baltimore. But the Bears have their own, less frequently noted, history of municipal desertion. Read about it in this 1999 piece from GQ.

And just in case you haven’t had enough of the 1985 Bears: In this
oral history, Ditka, the Fridge, and the rest wonder why their Bears team never won another title.