The day after Christmas, we decided to go ice skating with Susan's friend Karen and her husband Steven, who were in town from New York. Karen, a friend from college, has just had an enormous weight lifted off her life in the form of her PhD dissertation, which she had successfully defended only a short while ago. A week of uninterrupted drunkenness apparently followed. Steven is a former opera singer with the kind of resonant, authoritative voice that sounds like it should be telling you what kind of diaper or cough suppressant to buy. I'm still a little uneasy around them, owing to a little flap we had last year that pivoted on the fact that I am a vegetarian. (Sometimes these kinds of collisions are inevitable.) With some time between us and those events, I feel comfortable around Karen but remain suspicious that Steven despises me.

We went to the ice rink that sits at the center of the new outdoor sculpture garden, a park just off the Mall. In summertime it's a fountain, a wide round expanse rimmed with stone benches. In winter they freeze it, put up a little temporary building on one end to sell tickets and rent out skates, and erect another little structure on the other side to house the zamboni. It was charming and totally packed. People were waiting in line for an hour to get on the ice. So we trundled over to our old favorite, Pershing Park, another summer/fountain-winter/ice rink located a few blocks away. Although it's practically within spitting distance of the White House, the tiny rink is rarely crowded. Pershing Park is where Susan reintroduced me to ice skating, after an unspeakable skating-related early childhood trauma had made me vow never to strap blades to my feet again.

Steven is mostly deaf in one ear, and as a result he tends to start sentences when someone on that side of him has already started talking. When this happens, both he and the other speaker talk at the same time for a few words, often about entirely different subjects, until someone -- usually the person interrupted, who is probably the only person who's aware of what's going on -- tactfully drops out and lets Steven carry the conversation. Being intensely paranoid, I tended to take these moments personally, assuming that they amounted to little social skirmishes: Steven's way of telling me I don't matter. It also irritated me that I would meekly drop out of the conversation whenever he started to talk over me. I just didn't have the verve to yell on gamely and see if he could be made to blink first. He's got that damn voice, bursting with big bass frequencies -- it's like trying to muscle in on James Earl Jones. I might have been peeved, but I wasn't about to go voce a voce with Darth Vader.

On the way over, Susan assured me that I did myself far too much credit in assuming that the interruptions targeted only me. I allowed that my beliefs that he disliked me might be influencing my perceptions. It was far more likely that the man simply couldn't care less about me. Such is the danger of narcissism -- it can stoke paranoia as effectively as it encourages positive self-esteem.

I'm quite proud of the fact that I own my own ice skates, since I bought them in a used-stuff store for $6. They look vintage Hans Brinker, and I look exceedingly sharp in them until I attempt to skate. I enjoy walking down to the rink with them slung casually over my shoulder. Our trip to the rink on the Mall was a complete success for me, in that I got to walk to the rink, stand beside the rink, and walk away from the rink with the skates slung over my shoulder, never having to actually get on the rink, when the aura of cool competence would have lasted as long as it took my ass to hit the ice.

This was the first time we'd gone skating this year, and I was anticipating a particularly uncoordinated outing. But I surprised myself and Susan by remaining upright and (for me) graceful. I felt the edges of my blades bite the ice and hold me up. There was no moment of brain-stem panic, as in the past, when my system would react violently to the interruption of normal musculoskeletal feedback and start flinging limbs around. I just cruised around in the rink's small margins and enjoyed the sensation of staying vertical.

Karen and Steven had never been skating together, and I gathered Steven had even less experience on ice than I do. In my mean little heart, I was looking forward to having someone else on the rink who would be at even greater pains to stay on his feet than I. There's nothing like a beginner to make you feel like a pro. Unfortunately, Steven decided that he wasn't dressed warmly enough and wandered off to a local hotel bar to wait for us. I thought maybe we would bond over how pathetic we both were and everybody would feel especially chummy at the end of the day. I'm proud of the fact that I go skating, because it's one of the few things I enjoy despite the fact that I look completely ridiculous doing it. Naturally I assume that others will appreciate looking foolish as well.

The sky got dark, and we skated to appropriately cheesy tunes cranked through speakers that sounded like they were stolen from someone's basement in the early 70's. It was a blissful scene. Kids zipped around like high energy subatomic particles, splatting into walls and bouncing back for more. A pair of twins in shiny pink coats fell down so often that I began to wonder if they were having a private little contest for the most spectacular wipeout. The huge zamboni man shuffled across the ice in tennis shoes, headed towards the small garage-opening in the far wall. He drove the zamboni with more vigor than I would have thought possible, accelerating down the straightaways and then spinning the enormous machine around within inches of the walls. When he finished, we went back out on a perfect, reflective sheet.

I resolved to look for an even better pair of used ice skates.