A Skating Rink’s ‘Ribbon In The Sky’

Valentine’s Day is a perfect opportunity to play another song that evokes the winter season, given that so many NPR listeners have written in with songs that accompanied the first blush of love or the painful end of a relationship. Thirty years ago, listener Tracy Flynn was living in New York City — she now lives in Lewiston, Idaho — and on a trip to the Adirondacks, she met a guy named Billy, a friend of a friend.

Flynn wasn’t interested, but he was a funny guy — a nice guy — so she said to him, “If you’re ever in New York City, come see me.”

“So, what do you know, a couple months go by and there’s a knock on my door, and there’s Billy. Not just Billy, but Billy in a backpack big enough to trek across North America without ever running out of supplies,” Flynn says, laughing. “He looked like he had come to stay. I was a little alarmed at first. I kind of hinted around those first days and weeks to find out just what his plans were. Eventually, when he enrolled in a local university and got a job there and was going nowhere, I figured out that he was there to stay. He looked like he belonged there. I realized I no longer wanted him to go. He just fit right in.