January 13, 2025
Greetings from the blade,
There are many fun activities which require skills in order for them to be fun. You can probably think of lots of examples, like tennis or golf or surfing or skydiving, cooking, swimming, and of course skating. I’ll confess here that this is the beginning of a long list of things I am not skilled enough to have fun doing, some of which I am doing daily.
I thought of skating first because the idea of it is so bizarre. Imagine proposing this activity to parents today. “What we envision is that you strap these sharp pointy blades on your children’s feet, and then push them onto the most dangerous surface on earth.” So ‘Jarts’ are outlawed, but this still goes on?
When I was a little boy, my parents would take us to the ice-skating rink. Like other activities of this ilk, skating looked like fun from a distance, or in pictures, but it was not. This gap between perception-fun and reality-fun would scar me for life. Well, maybe I wasn’t scarred, but it made me a little cranky.
Winters in Michigan can be cold and snowy. I am required in my contract to say that when I was young it was colder and snowier in those days. And everywhere was uphill. My parents would dress us in layers consisting of all the clothes we owned and some that were borrowed, which was then zipped inside a snowsuit which was one size too small. Our feet were wound inside old plastic bags that once held Wonder Bread, and then wedged into rubber boots designed by NASA to transmit cold from the frozen Michigan tundra directly into our bone marrow.
We would walk from our cozy bungalow, replete with heated rooms, which was just far enough from Burrough’s Park to invite frostbite, but not far enough to warrant getting into a perfectly good car to span the distance. By the time we arrived at the park to begin skating, my sisters and I were numb in places previously unknown to us.
The ice rink was surrounded by people who had already realized that skating without skills was not fun. These people were happy because they were having hot chocolate and cuddling and not falling down. And they were having the kind of fun where you watch other people fall down, an activity that is so enjoyable the Germans created a word to describe it. Some people claim that Charlie Chaplin invented slapstick after trying to learn how to skate.
There were fires in barrels, a stand where one could purchase hot chocolate, and of course, there was a place to rent skates. I don’t know how much it cost to rent skates, but evidently the price was not high enough to give pause to my otherwise parsimonious parents.
Early in my skating experience, I wore skates with double blades, sort of like training wheels. These were designed, I am assuming, to give the novice a certain false impression of stability. The kind of reassurance you get from having two steak knives strapped to your feet instead of only one. (See ‘Jarts’ reference above)
One positive part of this experience was that we had so many clothes on that when we fell we could not get back up without assistance. Assistance was slow to arrive because, a) we were basically round in shape and it was difficult to to tell if we were upright or prone, and/or b) our parents thought that letting us suffer would build character, which they learned from reading the parenting book by John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage.
The layers of clothes also provided padding to protect our bones, which at the time were being built strong 12 ways by the Wonder Bread we were eating, which also produced the plastic bags wrapped around our formative feet. Science has since disproved the nutritional value of white bread and the insulating value of plastic. In fact, it is actually more beneficial to eat the bags and stuff the bread in your skates.
The early experience with skating was really just walking with skates on and occasionally gliding, but mostly it was teetering and falling down. Also falling down while trying to get up. There was also a series of memorable moments that featured falling down while falling down.
Later in life I graduated to a single bladed skate, which sounds a little misleading because it wasn’t like I learned something and got a diploma. The only thing I mastered about skating was the falling down part, which I perfected to an art form that rivaled Lucha Libre.
The guys I knew all wore hockey skates. They roared around ice rinks doing dramatic turns and stops sending spray all over the admiring bystanders. They skated backwards, they did jumps, they checked each other into the snowbanks. I wore what all the girls described as ‘Figure Skates’. These are the type that are used for dancing on the ice, doing pirouettes, leaping in a figure eight, and somehow falling in a more graceful manner. The hockey skate guys respected my figure skate choice so much they would sometimes wash my face with snow when I was lying on the ice.
Figure skates have little toe picks that I used to start, stop and to get up when I fell down, or to get traction when I was crawling off the ice. I would mince around on the ice, trying to maintain friction with the little teeth on the toes of my skates, which gave me the appearance of an awkward ballerina who suddenly realized the need to go to the bathroom.
Astute readers will not be surprised to learn that I did not continue skating when I became an adult, and realized the whole activity exists just to entertain people who learned enough not to put skates on. I’m not saying it’s some kind of a conspiracy, but it does seem to me that the only people who I see skating are children and crazy people. The rest of us are just having fun watching, waiting for the day for ‘Jarts’ to be legalized.
Hope this finds you gliding,
David
Copyright © 2025 David Smith
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