I slipped and caught myself despite gingerly placing one foot in front of the other. I was on camera. My coworkers watching me exit the Emergency Department ever so gracefully into a rare cold and snowy Seattle night. I thought about my landing on the icy walk… without a backpack to break my fall. It wouldn’t be nearly as amusing without Megan as my audience, a turtle turned upside down, sprawled on a sidewalk, teetering on a backpack, laughing too hard to return to an upright position.
The snowy Seattle day brought a flood of winter memories at the lake. Jumps, competitions to reach the lake with each run, snowball fights. The frozen lake moaning as we walked down the center, reminding us that the cold, dark water existed beneath a foot of ice. Ever prepared I played out the rescue mission necessary to save one of us if the ice were to give.
(seriously always prepared for the worst possible scenario to include when we had a fire safety lesson in elementary school – this led me to go home and ponder every possible route out of our house, obsessively, only to realize that this required a plan for other family members, pets and my stuffed animals. What if they didn’t know there was a fire, what if the fire was between my bedroom and theirs, because the fire would happen in the late hours of the night when everyone was sound asleep, and what if I was the only person to get out… these thoughts kept me up at night. I solved the easiest problem and jammed all my stuffed animals into a black garbage bag, secured it to the banister of the stairs outside my bedroom door [what do you think if you are the parent of this child] so that I could easily toss it out the window to safety before climbing out the window myself.)
I grew up spending one very long weekend at the lake every winter. As we drove to the lake as teenagers, Sarah and I shared one walkman and each listened to Depeche Mode through one ear bud each. We endured breakfast at a long table in the winter dining room during which Alex Klaessig ALWAYS spilled his drink (not a morning person as a child either). We draped layers upon layers of soaked items of clothing onto the fire screen.
I have no recollection of our parents or how they occupied their time and the memories of my time are faint but speckled with poignant moments. Will and his friends would come up to the lake for a long weekend every winter to play ice hockey… and drink and from time to time it overlapped with ours. At 14 years of age, I became intensely aware of the potential of this moment, the potential that only a young teenager can imagine. Will in college, filling his parents’ house to the brim with friends, was full of possibility.
However it was never a potential fully realized. Being at the lake with your family at age 15 when Will is at his parents’ house hosting a raging party doesn’t leave a whole lot of opportunity unless you are bold. Megan… not bold. Me, more bold, but not enough. In order to fully accept this, we lifted some beers from the cooler, sled to the bottom of the icy hill, bundled up on a dark night, passing through the woods and coming to a stop out onto the lake.
There we sat side by side on a sled, Rolling Rocks in hand, absorbing the various sounds produced by a party, the type of party we had yet to experience. Merely a walk down the frozen lake to the brightly lit house yards away.
I didn’t have a plan this time or I did but it hinged on another person reaching out into the space I was unable move into.
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