It was still the week between Christmas and New Year’s when my mom took me skiing. Young kids skied up to us. “Hi, Ray!” the kids said. She was, or she had been, their ski instructor; all the kids called her Ray.

“This is my son, Adam—he’s the writer,” my mother reminded the kids. They must hate me, I was thinking; they’d probably been forced to read my novels when they were too young. My mom didn’t even like my novels, I’d always thought.

Everyone who worked at Bromley spoke to her. She was just “Ray” to all of them—the other ski instructors, the patrollers, the lift operators. “This is my son, Adam—the writer,” my mom always said. My novels must have been a burden to all these ski instructors, patrollers, and lift operators, I was thinking, but that didn’t matter. I hadn’t known my mother was proud of me as a writer. At that moment, I would have followed her instructions—not only as a skier. I would have married the next ski instructor or patroller who skied up to us, or the next kid who was of age, if my mom had said, This is her, sweetie—this is the one I’ve been telling you about.

“This is our new Poma fixed-grip quad, sweetie,” was what my mother actually said, when we were riding the Blue Ribbon Quad to the top together. We’d started out on the old two-seater, the double chairlift everyone called “Number One.” That old chair had a center post, and it came up behind you pretty fast. If you weren’t ready for it, that Number One chair could knock you down; or, if you weren’t looking for it, the safety bar would come down and bonk you on the head. “You have to pay attention to that old Number One, sweetie,” my mom instructed. That was the lesson; the rest of the day, we were on the Blue Ribbon Quad. It was a better, faster chairlift than the old Number One two-seater, and many of the trails on that east side of Bromley were black-diamond runs.

My mother made me warm up on the blue runs; we probably took Upper Twister to Yodeler to the base of the Blue Ribbon chair. I just followed her. At the end of the day, my mom took me down a couple of black diamonds—certainly Stargazer to Lower Stargazer, and once or twice down Havoc. “You’re a better skier on blue runs, sweetie,” my mother told me. That was the lesson; on the steeper runs, I was struggling to keep my skis parallel, stemming my turns. I could have more fun on the blue runs; there was no shame in being an intermediate skier, my mother wanted me to learn. “Grace is a better skier than you are, and she always will be—just get over it, sweetie,” my mom told me.