On Tuesday night this week, I went downstairs to put something away before Bible study, and I stepped into a puddle of water. As Dad and I rushed to mop up and call Roto Rooter (while Mom dealt with Bible study), we realized there was water, albeit not much of it, in every room of the basement. As you can imagine, there's a lot of rearranging and chaos in the aftermath of a basement flood, even a little one. I've spent most of this week downstairs, mucking out, washing towels, cleaning the floor, and moving furniture back.

As I've worked, I realized that, in spite of the periodic weeding out I do, I still have a lot of stuff. And a lot of it is stuff I don't need and will never use. So I've been getting rid of all this old crap, and it's very liberating. Probably the most liberating thing was going through the big plastic storage bin that held all my skating stuff.

If anyone who hasn't known me long wonders what I was up to in the 90s, I was obsessively chronicling everything that happened in the world of competitive figure skating. I got into skating around 1993/1994, with the whole Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan thing, and the Lillehammer Olympics.

I didn't understand until I went through my stuff that my behavior was not normal but rather compulsive. Every network-televised skating event that occurred from 1994 to about 1999, I had taken notes on. Sometimes it was just the results and point standings, but sometimes the notes were quite detailed. I had two different alphabetized sets of records detailing thousands of skaters and their accomplishments, in men's, women's, pairs, and ice dancing. For years my daily routine included browsing the sports section of the newspaper for any mention of figure skating.

Around the time Michelle Kwan quit competing in amateur events, I started losing interest. The trend in skating was for jumping beans like Tara Lipinski and Sasha Cohen to jump and bob around the rink with little attention paid to artistry. I developed other interests (and became just as obsessed with them in some cases). But I couldn't get rid of my copious notes and dozens of newspaper articles. I had vague ideas of writing a book someday, an encyclopedia of figure skating. As time passed, I realized that I just had too much information. Trying to whittle it down to fit into a book would be overwhelming and incredibly boring. But I couldn't let it go.

This week, I finally admitted that I would never write that book. It would be too much work to put into something I didn't care about as much as I had in the past. I would way rather write stories. So I chucked most of my stuff. I kept the programs from the few skating events I went to, and a small stack of papers. I had to go through it all before I threw anything away, and I'm glad I did because I found some fun things.

On a page of notes about the 1998 national championships, I saw something scribbled in the margins—quotes from a commentator who was always rude and sometimes downright mean in his comments. Behind it in the stack was a letter dated January 8, 1998. The relevant parts are here:

To the ABC network:

My name is Sarah Pottenger. I am 18 years old and a college freshman. I am also a writer. For over four years, I have been gathering research to eventually write a book about figure skating. I am very pleased with your extensive coverage of the sport. You televise a lot of events, both professional and amateur.

I only have one qualm about it: Dick Button. I have no doubt he has great skating experience, but his commentating is very distracting. I find his comments harsh and abrasive. It really detracts from the skating.

(The letter goes on to detail the quotes I'd written in the margins of my notes. To give you an example of the kinds of things I'd found so mean, in one case he said a skater performed a spin looking like she was “hanging over a fire hydrant.” He had something mean to say about almost every skater in the competition.)

Dick Button continually interrupts the other commentators, and speaks in rude and condescending tones.

I hope that none of the skaters that competed watch any of your 1998 nationals coverage, especially the ones listed above. If it angers me this much, it would completely devastate them. No one deserves such painful remarks, and it really does take away from the skating.

I don't know if you will do anything about this, or even if you can, but I felt it important to let you know of this situation. Please take my words into consideration.

Apparently, it made me mad enough to write a letter, but not mad enough to actually send it. That was my M.O. growing up, writing angry letters or gushing letters and then not sending them.

I also found a preface to the book I never wrote, a dry recitation of my history as a skating fan, but this last paragraph cracked me up: “Writing is my first love, but skating is my passion. I wrote this book to give credit [give credit is underlined for some reason] not just to the big names of figure skating, but to the unsung heroes and the lesser-knowns. May your passion for life equal your passion for skating.”

(Sarah was unable to write a conclusion for this blog because she was handicapped by uncontrollable laughter.)