Somewhere in my youth the time to begin skating if I ever wanted to be in the running for the Olympics came and silently passed. I did not recognize its passing until much later. I persevered by continuing to roller skate on driveways and in garages. It was not long before I traded in my metal wheels for new boots with polyurethane wheels. These skates may have even had toe stops. They were ugly boots with plastic racing stripes appliqued on the sides. Mine were white with red and blue stripes. My sister’s were blue with red and white stripes. I preferred the polyurethane wheels, which traversed concrete almost silently. Their smoothness permitted more graceful turns and elegant stroking.

We left Stockton while I was in the sixth grade. My father had been an estimator for a building contractor and lost his job in the recession of the mid-seventies. This was also a time of great drought in Northern California. Maybe it was not as bad as I remember it, but I took army showers and created a list of ways to save water for a 4H project. I recall one that my father had suggested that wound up with an asterisk beside it on the master list that was given out around the community. It read: “Make an effort to keep things clean so they won’t need washing.” For a year my father commuted to a job in the Bay Area, a two hour drive each way until he established his own business. Finally an adult myself, I cannot imagine how he did the things he did, only that he had to. My father became a general contractor and bought property in Cambridge Hills, California, which is now a distant suburb of Sacramento. Then it was little more than a whistle stop on the way to Lake Tahoe. He began building houses. This also occurred during the recession and my father commuted not to San Francisco but to Cambridge Hills, which must have been an hour and a half each way. Since the houses were not selling, we had to leave Stockton and move into one of them.

Moving is a tragedy for a child whose friends and familiar surroundings are all he knows and constitutes his entire world. I remember crying for days begging my parents not to move us away. In denial, I never told my Sunday school teacher I would not be back the next week. My mother told me this was not a nice thing, but I thought if I ignored the problem, it would go away and all would be normal the next Sunday. I said good-bye to Audrey the morning of moving day, before each of us left for our respective schools. My sister and I walked down the road to the public school and Audrey’s mother drove her to Catholic school. It was a beautiful clear morning. While I knew I would not have another morning in Stockton, I could not imagine anything beyond it either. Shortly after we moved to Cambridge Hills, it began to rain. It rained profusely that winter and the drought finally ended.

The new house was Spanish style and situated on a hill. The driveway was so steep; the back of the station wagon scraped the ground as my mother turned from the street. Obviously, only a kid on a suicide mission would roller skate down such a driveway, but the two car garage had a smooth concrete floor where I continued to skate. In that garage, I first attempted a jump. No one would have recognized it as a technically accepted maneuver, but I left the floor in a half turn and landed on both feet. Even in such an unsophisticated trick, I felt like I was flying, as many great skaters describe their difficult jumps. I repeated the sloppy movement over and over each time skating successively faster. In my youthful ignorance, I called this move an “axel”.

I continued to grow as a skater by taking to the ice again. A new open-air shopping mall opened in Citrus Heights, a proper suburb of Sacramento. This mall boasted an ice arena which had a window where shoppers could watch from outside. A delightful sight, many people stopped to gaze into the rink. The rink offered free passes in the local newspaper which my father clipped for us. He dropped us off at the ice rink for the afternoon. I wore a leotard and tights with my rented skates. The old white ones with the mysterious blades no longer fit either one of us, though they were not lost in the move from Stockton. My sister and I became friendly with a few girls our age who twirled and jumped in the middle. An older girl flashed passed us performing lovely spins that left scroll patterns on the ice. A crowd of us gathered around the tracing, eyeing it in amazement and jealously. Boldly, I attempted a spin, but succeeded only in doing a three-turn. However, I had never performed a three-turn; and, therefore, had made major progress. Delighted with the new skill, I skated the rest of the afternoon doing three-turn after three-turn. My father saw me from the viewing area and later commented that I was skating well. We returned to that rink several times, though never seriously. Within a couple of years, the rink closed and the space was converted into an outdoor sports shop.

We lived in the Spanish house for less than two years. My father sold one other house, then the Spanish house. Consequently, we had to move into another one of his houses on the corner of the street. This is the house that would become my home. Although my father has since retired and returned to his family home in Wisconsin, I consider that house, now occupied by strangers, my home. I will probably never return to the Sacramento area because I could not bare to stay in a hotel and view my home from the outside. Yet there may be a day when I decide to return home to come to terms with things or work through things or face my childhood or some other nonsense when I will stay in a rented room and stare at the house from the street. If this happens, it will be years from now when I am old and have exhausted my list of desirable vacation destinations.

The house was a rambling ranch shaped in a “U” which followed the path of the street around the corner. It was large and customized in the colors and detailing of the late seventies. Although I have heard the kitchen has been renovated, in my mind it remains rusty burgundy tile with sunny yellow accents, shiny yellow sink, and harvest gold stove and hood. It is a hideous image for anyone who did not grow up in the house. Although the driveway was unsuitable for skating, the large garage accomodated three cars. In this garage, I became a figure skater.

For Christmas one year when I was in junior high school, I asked for a pair of sneaker roller skates. These were the rage in the late seventies, as was roller disco, but I was too young for that. My mother put the skates away in her closet until Christmas. This did not stop me from playing with them when she and my father were gone for the day. One time I actually skated around the house in them. There was no danger of these actions spoiling my Christmas. I knew about the skates anyway, and on Christmas I could skate publicly rather than sneaking around whenever I had an opportunity. The skates were blue with three white stripes on each side. The wheels were very big chunks of matching blue polyurethane that rolled smoothly over the concrete floor of the garage. I had to ask my father to move the cars out of the garage for me to skate. Sometimes I did not bother him if my mother was at work and her huge station wagon, which occupied the two-car portion of the garage, was gone. I brought a radio out to the garage or turned on the intercom to play top 40 tunes and skated around cleaning the surface with a large broom.

For a long time my talent was limited to three-turns and two-foot spins. I learned backward crossovers at some point. Soon I realized a three-turn naturally lead into a forward one-foot spin. While I never blurred a one-foot spin on wheels, I managed to learn a sit spin. This was not a deep sit spin, but it was certainly recognizable as a spin performed in a sitting position.

I learned by accident, by watching ice skating on television, and by watching artistic roller skaters at rinks. Whenever possible, which was not often, I went to a roller rink in Sacramento. This place was grossly tacky and decorated to look like King Arthur’s court with garish murals painted on the walls. The cornflower blue floor was wonderful for skating. The place actually had a wheel washing machine which roused my curiosity, but I never tried it. It reminded me of the ball washing stations on a golf course.

I still did lovely spirals and enjoyed performing them around that rink. I was only twelve or thirteen years old myself when another girl, obviously younger, approached me and demanded, “Can’t you do anything but skate around lifting your leg?” Now I can hardly imagine the will power it would take to control myself in such a situation, but pubescent children can be wickedly nasty. My mother used to say such kids misbehaved out of jealousy. That was obviously not true in this case, as the girl wore fancy skates, a pretty practice dress, and almost certainly took private lessons. I was just a big kid in department store boogie skates and sweat pants who took up part of the precious center of the rink. She would have to be crazy to envy me.

As a polite child, I was not motivated to be cruel to anyone. However, I was taken aback and embarrassed by the girl’s comment. Yet I did not realize that it required no response other than telling her to kiss my butt. I looked at the brat and said proudly, “I can do a lot of things”. My skating, something I had loved since the age of four, had been insulted by this rotten kid who was not a budding Olympian herself. By this time, I had learned a waltz jump, salchow, back camel and illusion. I did them all. Now maybe she was jealous.

No one challenged me again that day. The kids, who skated regularly at that rink, and therefore, believed they owned it, did not bother me anymore. I watched the same girl talking to someone who I assumed was a coach. She demonstrated on the indoor-outdoor carpet of the snack area how I did forward spins. I entered a spin from a three-turn, as an ice skater does. The spin is actually performed on a back inside edge. Translating that to roller skating terms, the skater rolls backward on the inside wheels in tight circles creating a spin. I observed several of the kids at the roller rink performing their spins on the forward outside edge, a technique used in figure skating for advanced camel spins. The coach watched the girl spin awkwardly in the ice skating position with her leg lifted indelicately as she struggled for balance. He nodded his head affirming the legitimacy of this method.

After the boogie skates, I graduated to a pair of white vinyl figure style skates. These fell apart quickly. The sole began to separate from the boot. My father returned them to the department store, and I picked out another pair of white boot roller skates. These were made of leather and had bright yellow wheels. They were not the thick padded leather type designed for jumping and spinning. They were intended for recreational skating. I liked the boots because they were leather, and I was too inexperienced to realize these were not good skates. The store did not have my size, so I took one size larger and wore the skates with heavy socks and Kleenex stuffed in the toe. When I look back at this, I find it pathetic. My family was not poor, nor were we wealthy. Desperate to skate in any available format, I would not let the opportunity pass to get a new pair of skates after the others had fallen apart. I did not know when the next time would be when my father would be standing with me in the store for the specific purpose of buying roller skates.

These skates served me well for several years. I wore them through high school, college and even skated back and forth to campus in them during my last undergraduate semester. Of course, I endured at least one nasty comment about those skates from a young girl in a roller rink. In retrospect, I doubt she intended to be cruel. She had been watching me skate and finally decided to approach. “You’re a good skater,” she began. As I was opening my mouth to say ‘thank you’, she continued; “Why don’t you have better skates?” I looked down at the sorry skates that were obviously too big and had sustained a fair amount of wear. I do not remember what I said. I probably just shrugged, too dumbfounded to come up with a biting reply. The answer was obvious to anyone with the slightest ability to reason. My parents did not buy me better skates, and I was too young to have a job. The department store skates probably confused her, as they did not suit my ability level. She may have wondered how I managed to perform jump and spin in those flimsy boots. Her comment could have been a suggestion offered by someone too unworldly to realize the value of finesse.

I did wish for better skates, the kind that one can only purchase in a pro shop; with boot, frame and wheels purchased separately. I never even asked for a pair of these. I did request a skating dress one Christmas. I saw one I liked in the roller rink boutique. It was a swirling pattern of earth tones with a flirty short skirt. I showed it to my mother and asked for it as a Christmas gift. I thought skating in one of those circular skirts would be much more fun than wearing shorts or sweat pants. I examined all of the boxes under the Christmas tree trying to figure out which one held the fabulous skating costume. In truth, none of them did. When I opened all of the gifts that Christmas morning, I realized my request had not been honored. This made me extremely angry. All I really wanted was one inexpensive leotard. As an adult, I can understand a family being unable to afford serious athletic training or valuing education above athletics. However, I cannot understand why parents would not buy a fourteen-year-old girl a cheap leotard for Christmas. Due to my good manners, I did not demand to know why I had not gotten the skating dress. I did not give up on owning a skating costume. The need for a skating dress was a factor that shaped my professional life.

The content of this site is copyright by K. J. N., 1999 - 2001