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SLIDING

As a child I remember that as soon as the ground got cold enough to hold snow, and the snow began to layer itself into a depth, my friends and I would hit the slopes, not for skiing, which none of us knew how to do since none of our parents knew how to do it, but for sliding. The first thing we'd do is dress for the battle of the hill. Putting on clothes for sliding was like putting on armor. We'd strap on a breastplate of wool or down, slip thick gauntlets over our hands, push our feet into heavy sollerets of leather or rubber, crown our head with a heaume of fur, and thus accoutered, stride forthrightly (if squatly) into the teeth of the downhill, dragging behind us the frail Rocinante of a toboggan or sled or a plastic orange flyer with yellow nylon rope handles or, if there wasn't money for these things, a lunch tray or a slab of cardboard. Anything to grease the skids to the bottom.

Sixth grade probably marked the last and best year of sliding in my life because, as a twelve-year old, I still could access the purity of frolic, undistracted yet by the muddles gathering on the horizon: girls, sex, sullen adolescence, college, pending adulthood. In sixth grade I could still be a kid, with all the callow ease that comes from knowing I had a warm family, three meals a day and snacks, clean clothes, a bedroom full of books, and no obligation to feel ambivalent about anything. And I could be a kid at the top of his form because the sixth grade was the "big guys" in the elementary school, the only ones with a man for a teacher, the ones who took over the playground for their games and who got to use the adult section of the town library. Seventh grade and junior high would bring its own diminishments and humiliations, but that year we rode the peak of an arc, our bodies lithe and well-timed, feeling absolutely "in" and entitled to enjoy our lives.

Every kid in the neighborhood and for a radius of at least half a mile would make for the nearest hill, and from a distance all one would see would be a slash of white covered with dark moving dots in Brownian motion. The particular crew I hung out with had a captain, a tall gawky boy named Albert who was actually a year or two older than us. He went to a parochial school and had to wear a uniform of white shirt and striped tie, but in the evenings and on the weekends Albert would discard all that and organize us into activities.
During baseball season he set us up in teams (we played with five men to a side and

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