On the slopes

At my Bat Mitzvah, my dad made a speech about skiing. He probably doesn't know how vividly I remember it, and I don't think I ever told him how much it meant to me. I was never good with that mushy stuff.

He compared my ambition, my courage and my willingness to challenge myself on the mountain with the same attributes in life.

I don't know if I'm as brave as I was at 13. Is anybody? I'm not sure if I was as much courageous as I was just plain stupid. But again, that's typical.

Yet on the mountain, I'm just as dumb. My family has gone skiing out West just about every year since we were toddlers. I got back from our 2010 excursion yesterday.

I'm a good enough skier to make it down just about anything on the mountain, but I'm by no means an Olympian. The more difficult the run, the more ridiculous I look going down it. If I make it to the bottom with no broken bones and minimal pain, I consider it a success.

For some reason, nothing about skiing scares me. I know there are risks involved, but my heart rate never jumps at the top of a hill, or in some cases, a cliff. I wish my dad were right. I wish I were as brave as I am on the top of the mountain as I am in real life. I don't know where I'm going to be in five years, and that terrifies me.

But I think my dad's analysis of my skiing persona applies to the rest of my family. My little sister is like me on the mountain, but she's 12. By far the most outgoing and social person in our family, her ambition outshines her abilities (which are a measure of her age, not her talent), and the only thing stopping her from skiing off the cliffs with my dad and me is him forbidding it--and then running off before she has a chance to catch up.

We call my brother the enigma. He's a beyond brilliant theater nerd turned classical singer. He hates physical activity, likes nice things, luxuries and staying indoors, but he loves to ski. And he's good at it. It makes no sense. In life outside of the ski hills, the rest of us spend a lot of time trying to figure out how he thinks with little success. He's too smart, no one can do it.

My dad is the best skier in the family. He skis with his feet locked together and a grace none of us can match. Off the mountain, it constantly amazes me how he deals with daily stresses with a tranquility the rest of us can only envy. My mom, brother, sister and I are pretty emotional. I don't know how we would've survived our childhoods without his ability to think fast and rationally under pressure.

My mom never liked skiing very much, and decided that she doesn't want to ski anymore. She came with us on the trip, but she stayed back during the day, taking care of bills and taxes, and arranging scavenger hunts for her grown children on Valentines Day. She's always sacrificed so much for us. I wish I'd appreciated that more when I was younger.

Jeff came skiing with us for the first time this year. I'd never skied with him before. I'd never even brought a friend on a ski trip before. He kept up alright. He and my sister were at about the same level, although he was much more cautious than her. His fear was the only thing keeping him from getting better, just like her lack of it was probably her biggest mountain fault.

However, he challenged himself more than he probably thought he would over the long weekend. I didn't challenge myself as much as I usually do on the mountain. I went slower so I could help out Jeff and my sister, and I tried not to push the harder runs on them before they were ready.

But that was probably a bigger skiing challenge than I'd ever taken on--to match my pace to someone else's. Off the slopes and back in Madison, one of us is not faster than the other; we've just always followed our own paths at our own paces. Now we're learning to plan our next steps together, with more than ourselves in mind. It's probably my biggest challenge yet, but it feels amazing that we're doing it so well.

I did get a few hours one morning to go off with my dad alone, throw caution to the wind and ski off a cliff. Jeff doesn't mind that I have to do my own thing my own way once in awhile, as long as I come back to him when I'm done.

Photo: Jeff and me at the top of the gondola