The adventure, ardor, and abuse of skating ~ January 5, 1989

David Heiller

Andy Rote was having the hardest time at the skating rink in Askov last Friday. He would skate about two feet before his own two feet would fly into the air, and he would land on his keester, as Ronald Reagan would call it.

But Andy, like most seven-year-olds, didn’t seem to mind the falls. For one thing, he had six layers of clothes on. His mother, Anne, who grinned from the sidelines, had made sure of that. He didn’t mind that his 10-year-old sister, Elaine didn’t fall down once, or that Tara Loew, at age 14, looked like another Katarina Witt as she circled the rink.

Andy just kept getting up, and falling down, and getting up again.

Noah and Joe skating,
Kevin is doing his very best with Mollie.

There’s something about skating that brings back memories for a lot of us. Watching Andy skate last Friday, and skating with my family on Saturday and Sunday, brought back some flashes. Someone always received a new pair of skates for Christmas in my family of eight brothers and sisters when I was a boy. The skates smelled of new leather, and the proud owner would try them on in the living room, wobbling from rug to rug while Mom reminded us not to walk on the linoleum.

"Keep pushing me, Kevin, this is FUN!"

Then down to the harbor we’d go, new skates or old. I’ll never forget the shock one winter on the first day of ice skating. I unlaced my skates from the previous year, and tried pulling them on, but they wouldn’t fit. I took off the extra pair of socks. Still not close. I cried and went home, and Mom explained that my feet had grown so much that the skates were too small. She dug into the basement stairway, grabbed another pair from a nail for me. There were always half a dozen extra pairs of skates hanging from nails in the stairway, one of the many advantages of a large family. These were about three sizes too big. We stuffed tissue paper into the toe, and they fit fine. I was back on the harbor in an hour.

There was adventure on the ice. Skating on the river, you had to watch your feet pretty close. My brother, Danny, hit a hole one night and bounced off the ace with a hard crack. He came up holding a mouth full of blood and a big piece of front tooth.

Another time, I was skating on the river bottoms, lost in thought with a full head of steam. I glanced down at my feet, and instantly felt a knot in my gut. Black water was rushing silently below ice that was maybe one inch thick. I made a quick but gentle turn. Any sudden movement would have cracked that egg shell ice. I made it back to safe ground, but not before I saw myself plunging into that fast current with a heavy pair of skates to pull me down. Very scary.

And romance. I’d like to tell about the times I stood around a bonfire on the ice, holding hand with a dark-eyed beauty, but it wouldn’t be true. (I never write anything that isn’t true in this column.) I did have a say in the romance of others, though. I remember once when Norman Cram and Joan Goetzinger were courting. Norman was about 16, and thought a lot of Joan, and even more of himself, because he wore figure skates, and not hockey skates, a suspicious choice in the eyes of a 10-year-old kid. There was a song out at the time titled “Norman.” It had a sugary chorus that went, “Norman, woo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo, Norman, woo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-oοo-ooo-ooo, Norman, Norman my love.” When I saw Norman Cram holding hands with Joan Goetzinger at the skating rink one night, the temptation was too great. I waited until he had started walking up the wooden steps from the harbor with his skates on. ‘Norman, woo-oοo-ooo-ooo- ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo,” I started singing in as sweet and as loud a voice as possible. Norman let go of Joan’s hand and came after me on the fly, thumping down the steps and flying headfirst when his figure skates hit the ice. But I had learned to skate pretty well by that time, and Norman never did catch me.

Now I skate around man-made rinks. There’s romance when I hold the hands of a dark-eyed beauty (actually, they’re blue). There’s adventure when I pull Noah and Mollie on the plastic sled so fast that the front end comes off the ice and they are suspended in air like a ride at the county fair. Ι fall down too, landing on elbows that don’t give like they used to. Then I lie on the ice and laugh at myself. Funny, every year our dedicated firemen flood the rinks around here, they make the ice a little harder.

Thank goodness for kids like Andy Rote, who can fall down and pull themselves up again. They’ve got a lot to look forward to.