by Kevin Noonan

Created on: March 17, 2009   Last Updated: March 22, 2009

"Without skates, but remembering God"

Winter. Upstate New York. A voice whispered my name. So as any brave twelve year-old boy must do, I heeded the call to conquer the elements. Snowsuit donned, I entered the clear, full-mooned night and began to slowly plow, step-by-step, a snow that had fallen a few hours before.

The voice led me behind my house to a shimmering white field darkened by stands of pine trees. Earlier that morning, the temperature had been balmy enough to melt a previous snow allowing miniature ponds to form beneath the branch circumference of various trees. Then an afternoon storm returned the water to its more solid element.

There, at the base of a gentle rise, I found my pond. It was small, but a long, low branch extended from a lone tree beckoning me to come. As I approached the tree I was certain I heard it invite me to skate. However, I had always been too afraid to attempt the defiance of gravity with only two thin slices of metal keeping me from high-speed and certain impact against the concreteness of ice. So I didn't listen, instead devising my own plan in an effort to maintain a twelve year-old boy's bravery.

I stopped several paces away from pond edge and turned to face the towering pine. Using the surrounding snow for footing, I began to run as fast as a snow-suited body would allow, headlong toward the branch that reached out to me as if the barrel of a gun.

What I had in mind was to slide across the ice toward the trunk of the tree at a slippery-fast pace, embrace the always flexible pine branch, and fall backward toward the ice. I expected the branch to arrest any injurious vertical movement to the ice and horizontal movement toward the waiting trunk. It wouldn't be until years later that my Ancient Greek Culture professor would tell me of Euripides' adage: "The plans of men are treacherous." Indeed! So, too, the plans of a twelve year-old.

I entered the sliding phase quite well; but as I approached the branch, its lowness wasn't all that low. To my distress, I quickly realized that the landing phase would not go well at all. My arms were a few short inches away from a branch-embrace and my grasping hands merely slipped from the cold, hard wood. I don't remember the actual falling phase, but I landed flat on my back and on the truth of the phrase: "It'll knock the wind out of you."

My brain suspended all communication to empty lungs in what was largely an egotistical effort to calculate how this could have come about. Looking up

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