A Balanced Life

Pursuing a sport without the requisite talent can be considered foolish; pursuing it over decades can be considered borderline madness. In this lyrical memoir, Patricia Schultheis uses skating to examine the richness and constraints of her Catholic girlhood, the impact of the upheavals of the sixties on her young marriage, and how skating provided a release from the demands of marriage, motherhood, and a career. When a series of devastating losses, including the death of her husband, knocked her off her feet, she wondered if she could get up again. But skating had been a constant in her life for so long, she returned to the ice and discovered that features of the sport its unpredictability, unexpected rewards, and many possibilities for grace mirror those of life itself.