The Loop at Green Lake and the Early Years

I hope this means that skorts are coming back

I hope this finds you well and in the sunshine. I’m sitting outside at a café across from Green Lake park, feeling the breeze on my bare legs and watching condensation drip like sweat from my plastic cup.

Green Lake has not changed in all the time I’ve known it. Yes, much of what surrounds it, just like most of Seattle, is barely recognizable these days but the park itself is the same. The old bathhouse-turned-community theatre looks like it’s still closed but the grand old entryway is till there and the grass separating the walking path from the street is still green and the trees running alongside the freshwater lake still bloom this time of year, creating canopies for the wooden benches nearby. There are more tents and encampments along the path nowadays, makeshift homes for people with nowhere else to go. The boardwalk is less pristine and you are likely to find used needles and discarded bits of life on benches that used to be clean enough to sit upon for long stretches, watching the ducks come and go, once upon a time.

For me, entering the loop from any direction is like entering a time machine. Although I have never lived close enough for it to be my local park, Green Lake was always where my family (and then later a teenage me) marked the return of sunshine in Seattle. For our young immigrant family, it was a safe and approachable public place where the kids could play on the playground or wrestle on the grass while the parents visited with each other, trying to figure out how to “do a picnic” when the food they preferred is centered on stews and flatbreads and not easily transported in coolers and baskets to be unwrapped with ease in public. No, our food demands more from you. Still, we tried everything there was on offer for us at Green Lake. There was even that summer when I tried swimming in the community pool.

In my teen years, Green Lake was where I met my dates; confused teenage boys who didn’t understand why I wouldn’t rather just meet at the mall and share a Panda Express. You see, me being who I was, I had a favorite bench under a favorite tree somewhere near the middle of the loop and my secret test was to see who would feel “like the right person” when I took them to that bench. I believed that the boy who was meant for me would know, immediately, that the bench was special. I never found that boy. One might even say that I am still looking for him, but how do you do the Green Lake loop test on a Hinge chat? You do not.

These days, the only digital thing whose algorithm hasn’t already learned to show me only stuff about travel, far-left politics, the arts and food is TikTok. There I am confronted by what seems like the entirety of the human race and every thought that occurs to them. One minute there’s a video from someone who is inexplicably “today years old” when they learned how to properly cut a bell pepper, and immediately after that is a young girl excitedly showing the camera how she styles her hair, and on it goes in an endless stream until I close the app. It was on one of these mindless scrolls that I came across someone gushing about finding a skirt that had shorts built-in. She had discovered skorts.

The reality of it hit me like a ton of bricks. Here is a person who exists in the same internet as I and yet they had never before seen skorts. Their parent did not take them to Sears on a rainy Spring day to buy summer clothes, most of which were jumper shorts and skorts. They did not graduate, in high school, from skorts to real miniskirts, changed to in secret in the girl’s bathroom before first period, the jeans in which you left the house shoved to the bottom of your backpack.

All of it, including this Green Lake loop, reminds me of trips to the mall, Wet Seal and Mariposa, watching my friends shop for low-rise jeans, unable to bring myself to try on anything that exposed what I believed were my greatest sins. Late night MTV videos with girls whose hips and thighs seemed to disappear under their jeans, their stomachs so flat that I wondered what happened with their organs. The words “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” ringing in my ears while I thought about how much I wanted to eat my mom’s shiro, hot off the stove. Billy Blanks shouting “double time!” while I gasped for air, on my second hour of TaeBo. No matter how hard I worked, the low-rise jeans never made me look like the girls in the videos, they just made me miss the old days when you could wear a jumper that covered everything so you could just exist as a person, walking the loop at Green Lake, neither at war or in love with your body. Just a quiet, neutral existence.