One of the precious bright spots for our family in this long dark winter of COVID has been outdoor skating. Other than the walking trails, it’s the only thing that the city has kept open. I take our boys, 4 and 8, while my partner is working. The older one has developed a speed-skater’s stride. He’s not crossing over yet as he turns, but he’s close to it. The younger one has amazed us all with learning to glide easily in this, his first winter on skates…As per the city regulations, we stay masked and distanced as we’re lacing up, and while skating. But two weeks ago, an anti-masker started showing up, and openly ignored the attendants who asked him to comply.This audio essay is about all of the feelings that came up for me as I a watched this unfold, tried to intervene, and tried to make sense of it all for myself, and the boys.
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Anti-masker at the skating trail. - Yeah.
One of the precious bright spots for our family in this long dark winter of COVID has been outdoor skating.
Other than the walking trails, it's the only amenity that the city has kept open.
So I take our boys, they're four years old and eight years old, while my partner is working.
The older one has developed a speed skater stride.
He's not crossing over yet as he turns, but he's close to it.
And the younger one has amazed us all with learning to glide easily in this, his first winter on skates.
This story happens in Toronto, but I'm not going to say where because I don't want the guy I'll be talking about to be identifiable.
I don't want this to be shaming.
I'll change some of the details too.
And I also don't want to name the place because, shockingly, it's never crowded.
We're privileged enough to be homeschooling through the school closures.
We're both self-employed and we can trade off between the home office and childcare.
The boys don't have to be on Zoom all day, and that's really lucky because I know there's a lot of kids trapped indoors while we're able to go out on the ice.
All you need to know about the place is that it's an outdoor skating trail.
It's an irregular loop with one end wider than the other, and a crossover in the middle for doing a half lap, and then a little nook where the boys can stop and rest in the sun.
The skating slots are 45 minutes each, and spots are limited for social distancing.
You can sign up online to book ahead, but we never do, because the city's website is terrible.
It feels like it was coded in the 1990s.
The attendants are young guys and women, freshman-aged.
They'll sign you in for walk-ons if you show up a little early.
And if we're lucky, we wind up going on after the Zamboni has smoothed and flooded the trail, polishing it up like glass.
The skating itself is unbelievable.
After all these years, it's still a miracle to me that the culture learned to do such a pleasurable thing.
Every day I look at my secondhand skates with wonder at the molded plastic holding the steel and how the new waxed laces I bought this year hold tight as I pull each set of loops.
How snug and warm the skates feel as I step off the black rubber pad at the edge into the white flow.
I skated for hours on end as a kid, usually on my own amongst a smallish crowd at the old arena close to my parents' home.
I remember the smell of the stale and damp locker room mingling with the metallic odor of the grinder the old custodian used to sharpen skates.
They would pipe in old-timey skating music over the tinny PA, and I lost myself in circles and circles.
I think it was 50 cents to get in and then there was an ancient hot drinks machine from the 1960s that would burble out terrible hot chocolate in a paper cup for 25 cents.
So for a dollar I could do two hot chocolates worth of skating.
Lacing up for the trail is all outdoors, with fresh air and mostly silence.
As I lace up the boys' skates, we talk about books and movies, King Arthur, The Mandalorian, and whether the rebels in Star Wars ever skated on the ice planet of Hoth.
And I told them the story of the 10-year-old Jewish Dutch boy during the war whose family owned a skate shop.
The grandfather put the boy in charge of his little sister and gave him directions to skate all the way to Belgium over the frozen canals, avoiding the Nazis on the way.
While we're on the ice, the boys go quiet and listen to their blades.
The little one hums from time to time.
There's some yelling when I race with the older one.
The gang that gathers at the trail every day is intergenerational, which makes that hour in the afternoon feel timeless.
There are a few other families there with little kids, either homeschooling or blowing off the afternoon Zoom classes, but there's also a clutch of older guys who come in their well-worn hockey jerseys and they lace up their old leather skates while talking about the NHL season and who got the COVID bad and who got it not too bad.
They wear those big hockey gloves even though they aren't carrying sticks and I think it's because hockey gloves have a kind of tough guy feeling to them that Bernie Sanders mitts just can't offer.
They're also all wearing masks, as per the posted rule, and we are too.
When we started coming just after Christmas, the signs said that the masks were required while on the benches lacing up, but they didn't specify about masking while skating.
But now the City of Toronto signs say, quote, masks or face coverings required on or off the ice.
Some of the older guys have them pulled down to let their red puffy noses show, but they're pretty good about it.
The kids are too, although some will complain from time to time about the straps on the ears.
After my older son bombs around the trail at top speed, he'll sometimes yank his mask down for a few deep gasps of colder air.
One of my favorite characters at the skating trail is this nun who looks to be in her mid-60s.
Very spry, in a full spotless white robe with a long rosary dangling from her rope belt.
Her blue surgical mask matches the blue edging on her white habit that's so long it goes down to the backs of her knees.
She seems pretty cheerful and girl-like in age as she glides past on shiny white figure skates in a whirl of white.
It kind of feels like a scene out of an old Disney animation or maybe the winter of 1919 before the Spanish flu where the nun nurses go out for a skate.
My boys have never seen a nun before, so one asked about her costume.
So I explained what that's about and a little about the nuns I knew 40 years ago when I was a Catholic schoolboy.
They were intrigued by the idea of people leaving their families.
Were they lonely?
I said they might be, or they might enjoy being alone with their thoughts and their work.
I said I thought it was nice that a nun could come skating amongst the kids.
I told them that I once knew a priest who said that whenever he was lonely, he would just go to a big shopping mall that was very busy with people, and that helped him feel less alone.
A couple of weeks ago, we were taking our skates off after our time slot, and I noticed a guy standing in line to sign in.
He wasn't wearing a mask.
He actually wasn't standing in line either, but rather kind of off to the side as though in a parallel invisible line that was just for him.
He was in his early 60s, white, hatless, close-cut brown hair in a neat 1950s Mad Men part.
He had a newish parka, clean jeans, no skate bag.
He held his skates by the blades in one hand.
Across from him stood a middle-aged woman in a mask, and by their glances back and forth it was clear they were together.
She signed herself in with the attendant and gestured towards the man.
The attendant said something to him I couldn't hear, and the man replied with the fateful words, I don't need a mask.
