Jane and I needed something to do.
It was just after the holidays, that time when the world is gray, it gets dark by 4:30 every afternoon, and the cold and damp just seem to settle in.
“Why don’t you try skating?” my mother offered. “When I was your age we spent hours from January through March making figure eights at the pond and then coming home to hot chocolate.”Not bad, we thought.
So Jane and I checked our allowance savings, and coupled together with what we could weasel out of our parents, made our way to the sporting goods shop in town.
In the 1960s most ladies’ ice skates all looked the same. They were white, had miles of laces, and silver blades. There was nothing very fancy about them, although the “cool girls” at school often attached pom-poms or little bells to make them tinkle or something else adorable. Jane and I were not of that ilk.
So we were content to just buy plain ice skates. “Do you know how to lace them up properly to protect your ankles?” the salesman asked. “Sure,” I said with a cocky teenage attitude, although I had never before had a pair of ice skates on my feet. My experience with skating had been roller skates that you strapped over your shoes, and I wasn’t much good at that either as evidenced by my knees with their permanent scars.
So off we went to a nearby pond with my mother’s Hallmark movie memory in my head and the promise of hot chocolate swimming with marshmallows waiting for us at the end of the adventure. The outdoor pond lasted about 15 minutes against the punishing winter wind.
Fortunately, there was a huge indoor ice arena a few miles away with an enormous ice rink. We found that lacing up our skates was not as easy as we thought, but with the help of a man who worked there, we got them on. Then it was time to stand up and head for the ice. “How do people stand on one blade and walk?” I howled. “I dunno,” Jane replied, hugging the wall.
Somehow we made it out onto the ice where mercifully there was a railing all around the oval. While others were making figure eights, swirling and twirling and gliding effortlessly, Jane and I clung to the railing, taking short clumsy steps. That lasted a few minutes until I saw a sign for the concessions and smelled the hot chocolate. We didn’t have to wait till we got home!
We didn’t give up, though. Every Sunday afternoon like clockwork we made our way to the arena and made it onto the ice without falling, searching out the railing. So week after week we plodded along, terrified of letting go, yet every now and then taking a chance and gliding. And falling. And trying to be graceful. And falling some more. But we thought ourselves very athletic ice queens, that is until Peggy came on the scene.
Suddenly a beautiful, tall, leggy figure skater named Peggy Fleming was America’s sweetheart She donned her first pair of skates at age nine, and finally in 1968 at Grenoble, France captured the gold in the 1968 Olympics.
Jane and I both hated her and loved her. How could this fragile, graceful, beautiful girl do what she did on ice when we could barely let go of the railing? Practice. When we complained to our parents, they spoke of dogged determination, years of getting up before the sun and practicing before school, then again after school. It was a life of sacrifice we were unwilling to even consider.
Today, Peggy Fleming is 72. She’s married, has a family, still works as a professional sports broadcaster reporting figure skating, and remains a name no one in the sport ever forgot. Today my ice skates are long gone, and my time on ice is usually relegated to spreading salt so I don’t kill myself on the walkway, yet when I look back on those days nearly half a century ago, I realize that Peggy taught us some valuable lessons: let go, if you fall down, get right up; there is pleasure and a delicious freedom in learning to glide, so work until you do; and if you can ever master walking on even one blade, you’re way ahead of the game.
Go for the gold!
Rona Mann has been a freelance writer for The Sun for 19 years, including her “In Their Shoes” features. She can be reached at six07co@att.net or 401-539-7762.
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