Flights of Fancy

Ann of Ann's Rants wrote yesterday what strikes me as perhaps the most perfect single sentence ever to capture what it is like to be a pre-adolescent girl. She was describing the activities of a typical "really fun" day for her eight-year-old self, and in the midst of the paragraph-long jumble of moving headlong from one thing to the next, she noted:

Do several amazing couch routines, because you are great at the ideas of gymnastics.

This single sentence sums up my childhood. Imaginative, and filled with a longing for things beyond my reach, I was fantastic at the ideas of many things.

I, like every girl aged 8-11, wanted a horse. I was sure our backyard was plenty big. And I believed every horsey story in which some lucky girl about my own age worked really hard and was rewarded with a horse of her very own. Nevermind that she invariably lived in the country and knew how to muck out stalls. I could certainly find a way. I could work hard.

And besides, I was tremendously good at the ideas of horseback riding. Didn't I, nearly every day, astonish my sisters with my feats of bareback dare-devilry on the old spring horse in our basement? Didn't I, in my tiny knitted slippers, balance delicately on one leg while being bounced headlong around a circus ring? Didn't the crowds cheer in amazement?

And later, when the bareback rider portion of the entertainment was over, didn't I impress them all anew with my fabulous dance routines? It was simply a fact that I was the very best of the three sisters at the ideas of ballet. Didn't I make up routines of weep-worthy grace at the drop of a hat? Weren't my long legs and fluttering arms a sight to behold? Didn't we, on Saturday mornings while watching cartoons, have dance contests to the tunes of the theme songs? And didn't I always win?

Throughout my whole childhood, these fantasies of grace and beauty, physical prowess and astonishing emotiveness swirled around in my head every day. I had taken a few months of ice skating lessons, but that did not stop me from skating along the family room floor to the music of the Winter Olympics, feeling the wind in my hair and the power in my leaps, landing perfect double axels, and twirling around to that magical sound of the blade swooshing tight circles on the ice.

If my actual feet, shod in slippers, never left the carpeted floor by more than three inches? No matter. At the ideas of ice-skating, I was unbeatable.

Horse-back riding, ballet, ice-skating...My body yearned towards those movements, instinctively chased the trajectory of those flights. I soared and cantered and pirouetted my way through those awkward years when one is no longer a baby but not an adolescent either. Not that adolescence isn't awkward -- but it is a known awkward, an awkward of burgeoning sexuality. The awkwardness of being 8 or 9 or 10 is that the magic of "firsts" (first step, first words, first book you can read by yourself) is past and the magic of first loves (be they music or boys) is future. The now, at those ages, needs magic.

And so, for the imagining girl, the time is ripe to become an astonishing prodigy at the ideas of many things.

The power of those ideas is consuming. You feel not just that you could do those things if you were taught, but that you actually are doing those things right there in your own living room. You have the physical sensations of leaping; you smell the sweat of the horse, your skin tingles at the chill rising from the ice. Your body moves through space, and in your mind's eye, you watch yourself, and even you are amazed at your own prowess. It is breathtaking, this power. It is as if you have sprouted wings.

Hints of those feelings come back to me occasionally. Skating outdoors on black ice, smooth as a mirror and vast as only a lake can be, I had a moment of skimming speed where I felt the untried Olympic champion stir within. But in the tentativeness of my 20s, I was too timid to hurl my body away from the ice, to trust myself to the air. To leap, perchance to dream.

The closest I have come to recapturing the power of those childish flights is when I discovered that I am surprisingly able at the facts of horseback riding. I can hold my seat better than I have any business doing, given how few times I have ever been on a horse. In the prosaic light of adulthood, I must also admit to a severe horse allergy. But that does not dim the dream of one day cantering along miles of deserted beach, barefoot, in a white sundress. I can smell the salt sea spray, I can feel the lowering sun warm on my shoulders, I can hear the rhythmic thrumming of hooves on sand.

When one has spent one's childhood being superior at the ideas of a thing, you see, it is impossible completely to erase thrill and romance of those ideas. And therein lies the perfection, and the poignancy, of imagination.