A Skiing Fountain Pen

Cold smoke powder, Okemo style!

There’s an old joke among Jews that upon becoming a Bar Mitzvah, a young man announced “Today, I become a fountain pen.” There’s a lot of historical context to the joke that’s not particularly relevant to the modern, gentile world (legal adulthood and the right to sign for oneself), but its deep-seated meaning still cracks up those of us in the tribe. And not just when we’re skiing in the Catskills.

In a funny way (not funny ‘ha-ha’, more funny ‘hmmm’), I had the distinct pleasure of being involved in a series of events over the holiday week that culminated in a young man becoming a fountain pen, in the skiing sense. I taught a three hour private lesson one afternoon to a ten-year-old from New Jersey who was getting on skis for the first time – let’s just call him Chris. Before we even got started, Chris assured me that he wasn’t going to be very good and that I shouldn’t expect too much from him that day. Naturally, as an instructor, I viewed this as a challenge and told him as much. Needless to say, despite some struggles and crashes of the normal variety, Chris finished up his first ever three hours on skis by lapping our long beginner’s Magic Carpet lift and making some pretty nice wedge turns down the adjacent hill. In speaking with his somewhat overwhelmed parents afterwards, I made clear that my expectations were for him to move to the chairlift quickly the next time he skied, despite his significant fear of heights. From there, things just snowballed. On afternoon two, we moved from the carpet lift to chairlift (lots of giggling and knee slapping there when his fear quickly turned to thrill), we made a bunch of runs on the lower part of our mountain, cleaned up his balance and rounded out his turns, and generally had a grand old time. On afternoon three, with our poor snow cover so far this season limiting our terrain options, we stayed on the lower mountain and discovered how much our bodies appreciate it when our skis are parallel. Then came day four, the big one, all day together, for bragging rights and all the marbles (an expression I had to explain – I guess there is no Wii marbles game).  We practiced on easy terrain, took a deep breath, hopped on the summit quad, took in the distant views, and skied like champs from the top of the mountain on trails of ever-increasing difficulty.

This progression is nothing unusual or ground-breaking, I know, but there’s more. When we met on the morning of day four, Chris’s parents informed me that they’d given him enough money for the day to take me out for a nice lunch – also not terribly unusual. After several long runs, lunch loomed large in young Chris’s mind. Someone, something (definitely not me), had whispered the words “Kobe burger” in his ear and it stuck. Off we went. We entered Epic, the restaurant in our Solitude Day Lodge, and when we announced ourselves at the hostess stand, Chris and I conferred and agreed that given that he was buying and that he’d just spent the morning knocking ‘em dead on the big mountain, he should order only from the adults’ menu – no mac and cheese or chicken fingers for this little dude. In a very cute moment, he did apologize to me for ordering a kid size Pepsi, hoping it was OK.

We sat there for a while, chatting away like two buddies just catching up over a burger. Then he asked the waiter for the check, and it brought down the house. It could have been anywhere and we could have been anyone, and the normalcy of the two of us sitting there, ordering fancy-pants burgers off the adult menu in the middle of a ski day that involved such wonderful accomplishments as though it happened every day was just so cool, such a gift to both of us, that we spent a good chunk of the afternoon grinning like idiots.

It’s a running line of mine that we’re not making the world safe for democracy by teaching skiing and snowboarding; but sometimes, quietly, I do think we’re making the world safe for democracy by teaching skiing and snowboarding. In this case, though I don’t want to overstate the importance of our time together, I am confident that the experience of learning to ski, of getting on the lift, of succeeding in skiing from the summit, of ordering a great lunch and paying for it, like a man and not like some kid, was important to Chris for a million reasons that have nothing to do with skiing. It certainly wasn’t the first time I’ve taught a great kid how to ski and it won’t be the last. As the expression goes, this isn’t my first rodeo. At all times, skiing is a wonderful experience, and at the best of times skiing is merely a delivery mechanism for a wide range of other things, other experiences and opportunities. In this particular case with all of its circumstances, it was pretty darn cool to be there when my student became a fountain pen, a skiing fountain pen. With a big juicy Kobe burger to prove it.