Faceplant

I reflect back on my childhood and on balance it was mostly an unhappy one. Two factors standout: 1.) alcoholic and emotionally distant parents and 2.) starting school at too young an age.

When I was two or three living in Greenville, I would see Brother and Sister go off to school.  I really wanted to go with them so Mom took it upon herself to teach me to read.  Apparently I’m a quick learner (at some things) and by the time I was four I was reading 3rd grade level books.

Our society likes to start kindergartners at age five and since I am a December baby the public school wouldn’t let me start at age four.  Mom and Dad decided that I should be in school and so they enrolled me in private school.  I went to a Catholic all-girls school where only the kindergarten was co-ed.  Just about the only thing I remember about going to that school was being an altar boy for one of the services.  I had to put out a candle and I remember being very nervous about it. I wore the robes and completed my task without incident.

That early start in school left me physically and emotionally behind my class mates for the rest of my life.  I was smarter than most of them, but smaller than most of them. Combined with my buck teeth, curly hair and overall naiveté, I was setup for a lifetime of bullying and abuse.

One of my successes in childhood was roller skating.  Mom and Dad used to drop us off at the skating rink every Friday and Saturday night.  I know now this was their way to get rid of the kids every weekend so that they could hang out at the bar.  But I learned how to skate pretty good.

Sister was a fast and bold skater.  She could roll around that rink backwards seemingly endlessly with incredible speed and power. Brother learned how to dance skate and would perform wonderful routines with a beautiful young woman.  I remember these incredible spins he could do, pulling his arms in to his body to increase the speed of the spin.

One of the skating sessions was a Racing session.  Boys and girls raced separately.  All the racers would gather into the center of the rink, then the rink referees would pick the racers for each race. They tried to group the racers for each race at similar age and skill levels.  The winners of each race got a wooden nickel good for a free coke.

I was a fast skater and I won my share of races, but there was this one kid that was a bit of a punk and I just could not beat him in a race.  I so much wanted to beat him. One night he and another kid were ahead of me in the race, dueling it out for first place.  Frequently in races, skaters would collide with each other and fall.  In this race the two lead racers’ skates touched and the both went down leaving me, the third place racer the easy win.  When my nemesis fell, he landed stretched out across the lane between me and the finish line.  I was going to win, and in my joy I decided to jump over my nemesis.

I didn’t jump high enough.  The face plant I made on that wooden floor was spectacular.  There were no broken teeth and there was no blood, but there was a lot of pain.  I came up bawling my eyes out.  The referee took sympathy and gave me a wooden nickel.

Dad was a roller skater as a young man in Memphis in the 50s. I’ve got a couple of great photos of him on skates and I have his profile from his 1954 high school yearbook. He apparently loved skating so much that his ambition was “to own a string of skating rinks.”