Thought.is

Growing up, there was nothing appealing about snowy mountains if you could not ski. And there was nothing appealing about skiing if you were a member of my family.

Like any eager advertisement for a teen film, the trailer for The First Time is a flurry of pool splashes, Solo cups, bikini-clad babes, repartees, lip-locking and low-grade violence. That does not really capture the experience of watching the actual film. That’s a good thing.

This is one episode in one piece of the world, but I believe that everything that happens here is worthy of praise: the stubborn, gray snow. The names of the roads. The island full of birds, despite the forbidding qualities that island takes on at night (every tranquil place needs a dose of the macabre).

Sports helped me to carve, however reluctantly, a solid identity for myself. And I didn’t even have to be good at them. I probably learned more as a bad swimmer than I did as a good runner.

It doesn’t bother most of us that our clothes have gotten lighter over the years, that the fabrics are more often derived from plastic, or that they die a small death every time they go through a cycle in an industrial-strength dryer.

No matter how much I saw of California, I still felt like a small kid wandering around the Museum of Natural History, intimidated, awestruck, and confounded by the size and volume of everything — trees, sunshine, cars, orange groves, crop fields, everything.

Other people can’t urge some fundamental shift in our beings, to teach us that when we do new things, we’re not doing something “out of character” — that we’re just living. We have to do that ourselves.