***(from the chronicles written in 1990) The following series, "Foothills of Childhood" is not really a creative writing, not a true embellishing flourish of words. It is merely a journalistic approach of times past which I basically 'compiled' in 1990 to entertain my boyfriend while he passed 5 plus months in jail. well, they can't prove he committed ALL those murders...kidding...he was in for a DUI...one of several. So take your relaxed time, and don't expect a Pulitzer Prize winner here. Okay?
Part 11
Winter sports were prevalent 'time occupiers' as winter existed for about 9 months each year. We called it spring and fall as well, but the truth is, we only had one warm year in history, sometime before the sand & gravel pit was formed. Right after the last Ice Age.
When we first started ice skating, I was 12 and my sister was 26. She drove me around after her marriage broke up. She had moved back home to live with us and her twin sons who were 7 years younger than I. When I developed a crush on Denny Andrews, I talked Joanne into driving us out to his place to skate one cold night with promises of bonfires along the edge of the ice pond.
She went for it gladly, since she virtually had no friends at this time other than myself and my goofy pre-adolescent almost pubescent plebes. We were enjoying a real good skate until Joanne went through the ice. We were not on a river, so she didn't need to fear for her life, but the cold to her hips was ultimate in both an unequaled sense of freezing along with a tremendously humiliating good laugh for the rest of us.
After that, we took up indoor roller skating as the alternative winter sport. Actually, we were pretty damned skilled at this artful event, so the most painful thing about it was the bus ride to the Joyland Roller Rink, 30 miles away.
Back in those days, the bus made a route through Rocky Grove and Sugarcreek (Homey names that conjure up a picture one would expect out of the mid south.) The bus was an old yellow school bus rather professionally painted up with the name Joyland on the outside, someone's idea of the perfect entertainment facility during the late 40s.
There was no heat in it, and no insulation, so on the trip up and back - for about an hour and a half each way, we took off our shoes and sat on each others' feet! I recall Jim Patton, one of the Sugarcreek bums who really thought he was every girls dream, giving us a lot of unwanted attention, until the one night when Francis (who was every guys nightmare) removed his glasses off Jim's face and sat on them. He couldn't believe it! He was then blind and about as secure on the rink floor as a jelly fish on a tight wire.
The best part about the bus was being singled out by the guy of your young dreams, to sit with during the trip, and making out like crazy in the dark. I was lucky twice; First I got Mickey, being his first real girlfriend; I was competing against the most adorable girl in all of Franklin, naturally curly blond hair, cute little nose, big dark brown eyes, fun personality, sweet (something I NEVER was). Looking back I guess it wasn't all that great an accomplishment. Mickey turned out to be gay and came out of the closet when we were about 28. I'm not sure just how the Joyland bus fits into all of that, but we did skate up a storm, and had a pretty damned good routine for a couple of untrained novices.
The second score was Mickey's friend Ronnie. Ronnie was a pretty innovative skater also, and we worked up a cute routine on the floor, and the bus.... I had a favorite mohair sweater, silk neck scarf and short skating skirt, knee socks and my very own tooled white leather skates with wood wheels and new ball bearings! We girls pulled our hair up into swinging ponytails, wore each others' lipsticks and were really sharp until one of us would discover that we had just started our period and had come unprepared!
Someone would have to give up one of their socks for the night in this case... Which reminds me of the night we tried to learn how to use Tampax. Some of us already got the hang of it, not at all an easy thing to figure out for those of us who were virgins, and the dumbest virgin of all ...was...Karen. I can recall 3 of us trying to figure this all out, instructions, suggestions going back and forth...even a suggestion to turn her upside down. What we went through to grow up with modern conveniences!
We had a unique type of fire escape at the school. It was a long metal tube-slide like a water-slide. We could climb up the inside and use wax paper to get it really slippery and fast. Then we decided to put a little piece of wood (perhaps a pencil) in the door at the top during school, so that it wouldn't be completely shut, and would remain...unlocked.
That night we climbed up the inside of the tube and broke into the school. I had a couple of garter snakes with me, and put them in a couple of desks for my unsuspecting victims. It seemed like a fun idea at the time. We never really got into trouble for stuff like that, back then. The principal was also our teacher, who had two grades - the fifth and sixth - in the same classroom at the same time. He always knew who pulled this shit and never even bothered to question us. He thought we were pretty entertaining actually.
It was his job to catch us at the bottom of the chute during the fire drills. After we got the thing waxed one time, I was first out and went literally shooting (or...'chuting') past his arms about three feet off the ground and over the edge of the hill, landing in a forward smoosh, not a roll, right into the coal ash and gravel and slid on down the path over the hillside. My left knee still has the gray ashes embedded in the scars from that one. And I have a sharp acuity of that pain, primarily of the principal cleaning it up with Mercurochrome.
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