Welcome to My World Read online

  Despite the fact that my parents led conventional lives and didn’t stray far from their roots, they had an energy that compelled them to do things their own way. Especially Mom. While everyone in her family made chicken and dumplings by rolling out the dough into flat noodles, she made little balls. But her independence went well beyond dumplings. She’s someone who says whatever’s on her mind to anyone, including me. When I was a little kid people often mistook me for a girl because I liked to wear my hair long. But if anyone ever suggested I cut it, my mom always had the same reply, “If that’s how Johnny likes his hair, that’s all that matters.”

  She likes nice things, too, and taught me about taste. Walking into a store, she’d turn to me and say, “Okay, Johnny, I’m telling you, I’m going to pick out the most expensive thing here. And then we’re going to have to downsize and pick something different.” And we always did.

  Many nights I’d watch from the edge of her bathtub as my mom got ready to go out to a party. She’d spritz herself with Estée Lauder’s Youth Dew (a scent that she started wearing religiously at the age of thirteen and is indelibly marked on my olfactory memory) and brush back her short, dark brown hair. Her wide-set eyes, high forehead, and square chin, which she had inherited from her father, were almost an exact replica of my own.

  I’d play with the lipsticks and eye shadow until she left the bathroom to pick out an outfit, then watch as she perused her vast leggings collection (it was the ’80s after all) for a pair to wear that night. A tiny woman, five foot three and very thin, my mother loved fashion. She had polka-dotted dresses, leggings in every color under the sun, and a lot of hot heels. She was crazy, crazy, crazy for shoes.

  While my dad slapped on his Old Spice, she settled on a pair of black leggings, pink pumps and an oversized cream top with shoulder pads. I thought her outfit was so glamorous. “Yes, Mommy, that looks good,” I said, offering my unsolicited stamp of approval.

  I liked that my mom was different from the other moms. Her short, slick hair was a far cry from the long, flowing bouffant that was the ’do du jour back then. She had a rebellious streak and didn’t care what anyone thought about her.

  My dad shared my mother’s independent spirit, but in a quieter way. A strong guy with a big, thick neck, my father built tree houses and forts, whatever my brother and I asked for. As a kid, I thought my father was fearless. Once he decided to burn a huge pile of leaves he had raked in the yard. But he put a little bit too much gasoline on it, so when he threw the match on the pile, flames shot up and his arm caught on fire. Wearing only a T-shirt, he scooped up my brother and me in the nonburning arm and ran away from the leaping flames. After throwing us into the neighbor’s yard, he rolled to the ground and put himself out.

  My dad’s toughness extended to his parenting style. When he gave my brother and me chores, they had to be done perfectly. After I weeded the flower bed and in between the brick walkway, he would inspect and, sure enough, finding a few tiny, missed seedlings, make me do it again. And again. And again. He wouldn’t tolerate anything half-finished. I hated him for his meticulousness when I was little, but now I get it. As much as my mother gave me my free spirit and love of special things, my dad taught me to balance that with an appreciation for discipline. You need to get everything done and done the right way before you can enjoy yourself.

  Mom taught me about style, Dad about effort. What they gave me together was respect—for other people, but also for myself. My parents never made me feel odd, even though I definitely didn’t act like all the other kids. When I spent hours lining up my toy animals in neat rows only to put them away again, they applauded my power of concentration. My mom didn’t mind when I played with her shoes, and my dad got me riding lessons simply because I asked him. That’s why I believed in myself a lot.

  While most kids get awkward if their friends make fun of them for something, I never changed my behavior because of what anyone else thought. Even as a seven-year-old boy, proudly showing off my new bike with streamers on the handlebars (my mom had bought it for me; Dad was against it) I didn’t let the other boys’ taunts ruin my ride.

  “That’s for girls,” they all laughed.

  “Well, I like it,” I said.

  Heckling only eggs me on, making me want to become more of whatever it is that people are mocking. So the next day I returned to the boys’ hangout, riding my new bike, only this time I had braided the streamers to make them even prissier. So what if what I liked didn’t match up with that of others? Life was whatever I wanted to make of it or make it into.

  The boys didn’t respond and left me alone from then on. I wasn’t always right in my choices—maybe the streamers were a bit silly—but I needed to figure that out on my own terms.

  2

  The Natural

  As a child, my mercurial imagination was matched only by my boundless energy. I hated to sleep when I thought about all the activities I could be doing. During the day, I ran the soles of my sneakers down from my various obsessions: track, roller skating, gymnastics, anything that wasn’t a team sport (which I despised because I’m simply not a team player, and never will be).

  My parents did their best to accommodate my every interest. During my gymnastics craze, my father built me a set of balance beams in the backyard where I practiced the dips, turns, and hops I’d seen on TV, not allowing myself to progress to the next level of beams until I had fully mastered the moves on the shorter one without falling. I pursued all my hobbies with the zeal and seriousness of a pro, even if I had no real idea what I was doing. When I got to the highest beam, I completed my routine by jumping off, then raising my arms in an Olympic salute, thousands of adoring fans in my head cheering for me.

  So it was that my parents ended up buying me a pair of beat-up black leather skates from Play It Again Sports, our local used sporting goods store, after the images of Kristi Yamaguchi winning gold for her country in the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France, sparked my fancy.

  My family always got Olympic fever during the winter games. It must be the Norwegian blood from my dad’s side coursing through us like an icy bobsled track. We knew the names of all the top athletes, their hometowns, even the cheesy made-for-TV backstories. My dad loved the skiers and bobsledders, but for my mom and me it was all about the skating. That year Kristi was a revelation, all steely confidence and extravagant costumes.

  With Kristi in mind, I laced up my new used skates, the blades as dull as butter knives, and flung open the big French doors that led onto the deck and out to the cornfields behind our house in Quarryville. The cold air blasted me full force. I had never been so happy to feel ice and wind in my life. The area had been hit by a blizzard and for the last five days my mother, father, brother, and I had been trapped inside with six-foot-tall snowdrifts blocking the doors and windows. It’s a miracle my brother and I didn’t kill each other—or that my parents didn’t kill the both of us.

  The sun was out and shining over the vast white landscape. My destination was in sight: a snow-cleared patch of ice in the middle of the cornfield. I took off, running down the stairs in my skates, through the yard and out to the field. The cold filled my lungs and the sun warmed my cheeks as I sped across the yard. All that was missing was the theme song to Chariots of Fire. But then out of nowhere I caught a blade on a frozen tree root and went flying face-first into a snow bank. Not exactly an Olympic moment.

  But eventually I reached the ice. Although it was my first time on ice skates, I’d logged considerable hours on roller skates in our home’s sprawling unfinished basement. The gray cement was the perfect surface for figure eights to various classical music cassettes my parents bought me for holiday gifts, and I used the steel support pole in the center of the room to practice turns.

  I was pretty sure these moves would translate to my rock-covered ice patch in the middle of a cornfield. In my mind’s eye, I was gliding smoothly and effortlessly in a sleek sparkling costume, the crowd of adoring fans chanting my
name. Of course, anyone who saw me that day must have wondered who the crazy kid was in the beat-up blades, hopping over small stones and pumping his arms like he’d just landed a triple axel.

  I definitely caught the skating bug that winter afternoon in the cornfields. The feeling of speeding from one place to another so quickly was amazing. And that might have been the start of my career on ice if not for a certain dapple gray Arabian horse-cross Shetland pony named Shadow (no relation to my cat). My parents had bought him for me after my love of equestrianism grew way past the meticulous Breyer display on my bedroom shelf and into a serious commitment to competitive horseback riding. I’d been around horses since I was a baby, but shortly after turning nine, something inside of me clicked—probably the fact that my dad had competed in horse shows as a kid and had a small chest filled with pretty ribbons to prove it. I told him I wanted to learn to ride the way he had.

  I started taking lessons in English saddle and fell in love instantly. I’ve always been intensely competitive—if another kid could climb up a tree in two minutes, I wanted to be able to do it in one—so with the framework of instruction to channel my innate ability to focus, success came quickly. When my trainer Sue said, “You have to work on your posture,” I went home and sat perfectly straight for two hours until my back was shaking. In school, when all the other kids were sleeping on their desks during a moment of quiet, I practiced making my ankles stronger by lifting and lowering my feet for a beautiful line in stirrups.

  I won my very first show and within a year was close to making the national team, despite the fact that I was young—and small for my age. It was clear I had a future in horseback riding, so much so that my parents uprooted the entire family from our dream home when I was ten so that I could be closer to my training facilities. The old leather skates wouldn’t be making the journey.

  As much as I appreciated my family’s sacrifice, I wasn’t thrilled to be the newest resident of Little Britain. Quarryville hadn’t exactly been a thriving metropolis, but compared to Little Britain it felt like Paris in the springtime. The exotic Amish had been supplanted by lonely and desolate land.

  I was on the horse seven hours a week, but that still left plenty of time to kill. My parents, perhaps worried that I might find devil’s play to pass the time, continued to look for activities to occupy me. Nearly two years had passed since my foray in the cornfields, but I still talked about ice skating, and I still busted out the roller skates every chance I got. And so, Christmas morning in 1994, several months after we moved to Little Britain, found me unwrapping my first pair of real figure skates—black beauties with blades so sharp they could cut skin. And that wasn’t all. The gift also came with a package of group lessons at the University of Delaware’s professional skating rink, about a forty-five-minute drive from our new home.

  The ice rink was littered with kids flailing around on skates. My group name, the Orange Triangles, said it all. I’d signed on for lessons to jump and spin like the beautiful skaters I had seen on TV, not trudge around the ice being called by the shape of a construction sign.

  The shapes were a necessity. They were the only way the teachers could keep track of the hordes of kids on the ice during lesson time. Blue Circles, Green Squares, and Orange Triangles separated fifteen different groups of at least twelve kids. It was a veritable Grand Central Station on ice. At eleven, I was the oldest kid by far in my group and the only boy to wear figure skates. The other lads in their hockey skates gave me a few weird looks but I had absolutely no interest in being a hockey brute.

  The hour-long lesson almost over, I couldn’t wait for the hour of free skating that came in the package price. The teacher had spent most of her time on falling and getting up on the ice (the first thing anyone learns in figure skating). Decked out in my favorite black tracksuit made out of windbreaker material with big green and purple triangles on the shoulders, I was ready to let it rip. The University of Delaware Ice Arena, as big as a small stadium, fueled my imagination.

  So did Oksana Baiul, whom I had been transfixed by while watching the 1994 winter Olympics (the first to be played separate from the summer games). Along with the rest of the universe, my family had been glued to the TV watching to see if Nancy Kerrigan, the favored American, would take home gold. But my heart belonged to Oksana. She was so much more fun to watch. Her skinny body, adorned in a pink costume with marabou trim on the sleeves, moved fluidly and musically. She was exotic, from a far-off land called Ukraine, which I’d proceeded to do book reports on (I loved to trace the Cyrillic alphabet from a book I found about the Soviet states, imagining myself wrapped in fur and riding a large sleigh through a mysterious and snow-swept city). When she won the Olympics, I wasn’t surprised. And the uproar after—that she didn’t deserve it and the competition had been fixed—made me love her even more.

  As soon as I was released from the gulag of my group, I took off. No longer a novice with two lessons under my belt, I was a champion skater like Oksana with imaginary fans who began to fill the seats of the arena. But to be a real skater, you had to jump. Any idiot knew that. So that’s what I had planned for today—to do a jump like I had seen on TV.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but I had been unconsciously training myself to be a figure skater. Through the movement of roller skating and the rigor of horseback riding, I was very aware of my body and its different functions. On a trampoline in back of our house, I had spent the summer practicing rotating like the skaters on TV, jumping up, spinning, and landing.

  I headed for a small opening in between a girl tottering in bright pink pants and two boys pushing each other hockey style. Once in the clear I pushed off on one leg and jumped forward, flying in the air as I rotated around one and a half times, and landing backward. It felt just as great as I had imagined, and I planned to spend the next fifty-two minutes doing them again and again while my adoring fans cheered me on.

  But my group teacher interrupted me.

  “Johnny, do you have any idea what you just did?” she said, pulling me aside.

  I had no idea she had been watching me.

  “Yeah, I jumped.”

  “You did an axel. That usually takes someone at least two years to learn. You just did it in two hours.”

  I wasn’t too sure about this lady. Priscilla Hill, my new skating teacher, showed up to our first lesson wearing a snowsuit . . . in the summertime. It wasn’t even a cute girl’s snowsuit but rather a big puffy gray one from the U.S. Air Force, for which her husband flew planes. She also called me Johnny, which I hated. Although my family called me that to differentiate me from my dad, at school and in my professional life I went by John. I tried correcting her a bunch of times, but she seemed not to take notice. Very happy and smiling all the time, Priscilla had an extremely childlike aspect that made me feel like she was younger than me. Her accessory of choice was a backpack in the shape of a panda bear.

  The teacher who had noted my axel brought me to Priscilla not only because she had won national medals during her competitive skating career and now coached a lot of good skaters but also because she was a “lefty” like me. Those who rotate counterclockwise when they skate only account for about 20 percent of people, and it’s important to have a coach not confused by the difference.

  After one lesson, Priscilla gave me her opinion: I had a lot of talent but I needed more time on the ice. A lot more time. At eleven years old, I was practically middle-aged for a figure skater. My skills weren’t nearly up to par, she said. Just as you have to practice a foreign language, I would have to work every day to become fluent. Once a week certainly wasn’t going to cut it. We needed to move to Delaware because Priscilla didn’t want to work with me after “he’s been in the car for a long commute and exhausted,” she told my mom and me.

  Move to Delaware? I was floored. We had just moved for my horseback riding, plus I didn’t want to live in a totally different state, away from all my family and friends. From the minute the first teacher pulled m
e from the crowd, I knew I wanted to be in the Olympics. But I didn’t realize everything that it entailed. I didn’t realize that I wouldn’t be able to live a normal life or keep riding.

  I definitely didn’t understand the financial strain of paying for all my activities. I had a good riding pony, which costs the same as a car and is expensive to maintain. Now my parents were faced with paying for a skating coach and renting time on the ice.

  My mom, however, understood I couldn’t continue to ride horses and skate at equally intense levels. The money issue aside, I wouldn’t have been able to keep both up, plus go to school. The next day she sat me down at the breakfast bar facing our kitchen and said, “Johnny, you have to make a choice. Are you going to ride or are you going to skate? Because we can’t afford for you to do both, and your body can’t handle doing all this stuff.”

  It was such a big decision, one that would affect not only my future but that of our entire family. We would have to move again if I chose skating, and to a totally different kind of environment. But my mom was content to leave it up to me. Even when we were little, she respected her kids and let us make up our minds about pretty much everything.

  She left me at home to “sit and figure out what you’re going to do” while she went to the grocery store. For the next three hours I stayed glued to my stool, staring at the white tiles with blue flowers of the bar and contemplating what would be the right choice for my life. I kept alternating between the image of myself as an Olympian in horseback riding versus figure skating.

  My mom finally returned and, after putting the groceries away, asked if I wanted a sandwich. “Please,” I said. She made me my favorite—roast beef with tomatoes—and sat down next to me. “Okay, Johnny. You’ve been alone long enough; did you make a decision?” I immediately started crying because I had made a decision, and it was a hard one: “I’m going to skate.”