Skating

 

My first -- and only -- pair of figure skates were the stuff of fantasy when I got them as a teenager. They're battered now and too small for my ancient feet, but they link me to a lot of memories. Photo by John Denniston. 

Once, at a skating party at a schoolmate’s place, I ended up at the end of a “Crack the Whip” line – a long string of kids whipped around by a central figure, with the speed and force growing the farther out you got. The predictable happened, and I still can feel the scar from where my skull hit the ice, still remember the doctor not being impressed at kids who play Crack the Whip.

Then there were the figure skates, the fantasy of little girls who must make do with hand-me-down brown boys’ skates when that’s all that’s available. When I finally achieved the white version with the to-die-for little black heels, I lay them on the bed in the box and tissue paper they came in, and checked on them all evening. They looked magical in the moonlight.

Every day through the long, long prairie winter, the blare of the noon buzzer at Lougheed Elementary School unleashed a flood of kids to the outdoor skating rink kitty-corner across the street. A brief lace-up in the bare-bones warming hut, with its inadequate central stove and perimeter benches, and it was out on the ice for an hour, round and round, to and fro, backwards and forwards, avoiding the boys’ roughest games, and not playing Crack the Whip.

In Vancouver, where skating is mostly expensive and inaccessible, I haven’t skated for years. When I last tried, the ice was so very slippy, the danger so very high, my muscles so very unaccustomed, that I concluded it was something old people shouldn’t dabble with.

Which is why it was so surprising a couple of months ago to see my sister Betty – granted, a few years younger, but still a senior and with arthritis, for heaven’s sake – skating away like a teenager. Apparently the exercises she’s doing for her arthritis have strengthened just the right muscles, and her physio says skating is the best thing she can do.

Here is the video she sent me, taken on a lake near her Quebec home. The very obedient dog is Molly. I am jealous.