I always knew why dad got angry whenever I whined and complained after being told that we were going on a family outing to the local ice rink. But only recently did I learn that it wasn’t my fault.
Dad’s gone now, and I can’t explain it to him. The only solution is to die and tell him myself. But there are too many other things I want to do first.
Ice skating isn't one of them.
Every winter between 1965 and 1969 my mother and father decided to take my sister and me to the ice rink at Roosevelt Field Mall in Westbury, on Long Island. They thought they were giving us a treat; thousands of families from all over Nassau County came to the rink, where carefree kids and teenagers would speed and twirl and glide and make funny faces and laugh and, once off the rink, munch on delicious hot pretzels and sip soothing hot chocolates. It was a treat. No school, no homework, no studying. Just the joy of endless ice skating and goofing around. It was supposed to be fun.
For me, it was anything but.
The anguish began the moment I pulled the skates onto my foot, which I never seemed to do properly and which never felt right. Dad tried to help, but his look of exasperation when I winced and kvetched made it even more tormenting. Trying to get from the bench to the rink was my own preteen version of Dead Man Walking, both because I knew how I would fare once upon on the ice and also because I was able to anticipate my father’s death row scowl and the last rites that would follow:
“You’re not even trying. Stop being a baby.”
I thought I was trying. But my ankles just wouldn’t keep my foot straight enough to skate. Deep down I knew that at eight, nine and ten years of age I should no longer be whimpering and bellyaching like that; my sister, when she was that age, had never made a scene at the rink. Quite the contrary, she enjoyed it very much. So I would take a deep breath, grab onto the side railing for support, and pull myself along inch by inch. “Let go, let go,” my father would growl, indicating with his head and eye movements that my sister and about two hundred other kids were already speeding, twirling and gliding along on the rink, with smiles to go along with it. Where was my smile?
I didn’t have one.
So I went around like that two or maybe three times, holding on, looking as glum as I felt, dreading each time I would pass my father standing by the opening; I knew he would urge me to let go of the damned railing and get out there and skate. And I’d try, and I’d fall, and my ankle, already sore, would get even worse.
And then there was that so-called vacation in the Catskill Mountains, at a hotel that had a ski slope and a class for beginners. My parents decided that it would be fun for my sister and me to give it a whirl. I didn’t have much interest—I would have much rather snuck backstage to check out the instruments and microphones or go to the lounge to watch a magician do some slight-of-hand. But I was only 11 or 12 and dad didn’t want me traipsing all over the hotel by myself. It was one of those gaudy sprawling resorts, the 1960s land-locked Jewish equivalent of today’s Carnival Cruise liners. Too many nooks and crannies, schnooks and grannies, to distract or connive an innocent boy like me, dad felt. No, I had to join the rest of the family on the slope and take my very first beginner’s lesson.
Which was a disaster.
For some reason I was unable to keep my right foot straight enough to go down the hill in a straight line, and instead I veered off to the right and into a wall of snow that was at least eight feet high. I involuntarily carved out one of those comical cutouts in the wall of snow indicating that something had gone terribly awry, like Wile E. Coyote going through the side of a mountain in an old Roadrunner cartoon. But my father didn’t think it was very funny. He just couldn’t understand why I had to be the one to interrupt the normal course of events on the busy beginners trail.
About a year ago, my right foot started aching even more than it had, off and on, for the past 50 years or so. Whenever I would do a lot of walking, or whenever I would try to do some short-distance hiking, or whenever I would have to go up and down the steps dozens of time a day, my right foot would send me signals that I should just sit down, for crying out loud, before the pain worsened. But one day it got so bad that I went to the doctor, who sent me to a specialist, who said “This will probably hurt” before using his fingers to press a specific spot on my right foot, to which I responded, “Holy crap, you’re right, it hurts.” He sent me to radiology. The x-ray showed that the tendon in my right foot, although physically present, might as well not be because it is completely ineffectual. It hardly works at all. The doctor said it had probably been that way since birth. I was born with a non-working tendon. I told him that when I was a kid I was unable to ice skate or ski, and he said that was the reason.
My options, I was told, were rigorous daily exercises designed specifically for the problem, or surgery. Either or both might work—or do no good at all. There was a chance, he said, that with exercise and a little luck the tendon could regenerate and start doing what it’s supposed to do.
Thank you, Mr. Röntgen.
But if the tendon does regenerate, my wife may want me to go ice skating or skiing with her and our grandchildren (she’s mentioned it a few times), and I’m not sure if I want to. I might find out I’m really good at it.
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