It was as unfeasibly smooth and green as a billiard table, my dream field, and as I jogged across it I was aware of the crowd watching me. Getting excited, they were, as if they knew what was coming before I did. I smiled to myself, because suddenly I knew too, and then I was in the air and upside down – hanging there for that magic second in the middle of a back flip when the crown of the head is just inches from the ground and the soles of the feet are pointing at heaven. And the world is upside down. I had once seen a photograph of a fifties actor on a New York street with his girlfriend and the camera had captured him at just that exact moment – hanging upside down in the middle of a back flip, his blond curls almost scraping the city sidewalk, his right-way-up girlfriend smiling at the camera, beautiful and proud. His name was Russ Tamblyn. He had been in West Side Story. Or maybe he hadn’t been in West Side Story just yet, and that was still ahead. But he was a dancer. Like my wife.
