Skating in Houndsfield Heights

... the pics at the end of figure skates ...

You could get your skate's sharpened
for a price in the shack.

I asked Santa Claus for ice skates when I was five.

Santa brought me bob skates.

My dad put them on me later Christmas day and I raced around the Houndsfield Heights Community rink, one foot ahead of the other.

Then I asked my dad when I would be getting real skates – not the ones for babies.

I got real skates in January – beautiful white figure skates with new laces through the eyelets and hooks up the calf of my leg . I couldn’t race around the rink on as I could with the bob skates but I practiced faithfully and asked if I could take figuring skating lessons. The lessons were held once a week down at the Hillhurst Community Centre. I would walk over the 14th Street and then down the hill to 5th Avenue where a teacher would give progressively harder lessons -- how to use the inside curve of my skate blade and then the outside curve. I learned how to skate backwards, how to do figure 3’s and figure 8’s. Doing the swan was hard for me since it had to be done on one leg, using both the inside curve on one try and the outside on another. I would practise doing the spin and was so thrilled when the teacher explained the science of drawing my arms in from outstretched to closer to my body, making my spin go faster.

I can remember sitting by the potbelly stove in the shack, warming up my cold toes and fingers before I would go outside onto the rink to practise my figures again. I walked down to the rink every evening to practise. During free skating time music would play over the loudspeaker at the ring: “Oh how we danced on the night we were wed,” and the music from The Blue Danube or the Tennessee Waltz. I can still do the lyrics: I was dancing / with my darling / to the Tennessee waltz / when an old friend I happened to see / ....

Flood lights were positioned at all four corners of the right. When darkness came – which is pretty early in December and January, we would skate around the edges of the rink while couples who were skating together would glide along the ice, holding each other’s hands, arms crossed. And some of them would waltz together in perfect dance position, one going forward, the other going backwards, their legs in perfect unison. I think I can still hear the crackle as their skate blades cut the ice on their way by me.

Arta