Santa Steps In

My brother has been reading my posts, and we were recently discussing our traumatizing childhood event over roller skates.

It begins with a question: How can you keep up with your friends when your parents are constantly holding you back? Living in southern Turkey was bad enough what with only three English-speaking television shows. My sister, brother, and I were forced to play outside, come up with our own diversions, and play with our friends. Normally, that wouldn’t be too bad, but this one particular summer it seemed as though all our friends had roller skates while we had none. Nothing can be more pathetic than having your friends skate down the street while you run after them.

Of course, my parents felt that they had a good reason for ruining our lives. They insisted that skating was too dangerous. Indeed, my friends had all sorts of bumps, bruises, scrapes, sprains, and assorted markings of every size. Our area had no sidewalks, so kids skated on the uneven roads dodging cars. Any little stone could be a hazard and pitch you forward onto an oncoming car. Kids soon discovered that at the end of the road, you could skate in the medical center’s ambulance lot. There the concrete was smooth, and the ambulances warned you with a blast of the siren to get out of the way when they had to leave or return. My parents felt that having to get out of the way of a speeding ambulance was dangerous, too. “If your friends jumped off of a cliff, would you?” they asked. “No,” I said thinking that was a dumb question. My friends didn’t jump off of cliffs. They roller skated in an ambulance lot.

Having had enough of our pleading, puppy-dog faces, my mother said she would get us skates. I should have been suspicious because my mother didn’t usually cave in so easily. What my mother produced was one pair of red, plastic skates to be shared among the three of us. Our friends had the real metal skates. You placed your heel against the back support with the straps to hold it in, your toe in the brace, and then tightened it with a key so it didn’t slip apart. Ours didn’t even have a key – just an extra yellow strap. To make matters worse, we were not allowed out of mom’s eyesight with the skates. We had to practice on a patch of hard dirt in our yard until she was convinced we knew what we were doing. If my parents were out to stunt our social growth (as I long suspected), these plastic skates were the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes.

The summer faded, school started, and the plastic skates were forgotten. This was not because of the weather. We never got snow in our area of Turkey. We put them away because the whole joy of skating was sufficiently killed and buried. But as luck would have it, the forces of nature came together to create a miracle. Kris Kringle, aka Santa Claus, got wind of our dire situation. Kids may be starving in China and begging in India (as my parents constantly reminded us), but he had deemed our embarrassing predicament as worthy of utmost attention.

That was why on Christmas morning, three special packages were waiting to be ripped open. To our everlasting surprise, we were presented each with our own pair of roller skates. We were so surprised that we just stared at the lids of the boxes. The picture on the lids showed not just any skates but real, honest-to-goodness boot skates. After this pause, we opened the boxes and pulled out our skates. The skates for my sister and I were white leather while my brother had black. Without any hesitation we slipped them on (even though we didn’t have on any socks) and began gliding on the carpet of the living room. Santa had totally come through. He had brought us from the deepest despair to the highest peak of delight. And no way was I prepared to give my parents even the least bit credit. I gave credit only to the Spirit of Christmas which had somehow managed to roll over their heads, back up, and roll over them again. I did say a hearty thank you to them, though, mostly so they wouldn’t get mad and take the skates back.

Skating with our friends made up for the emotional torture.