Skate Champion
“I wasn’t always this way,” she smiled down at her overly excited grandchild. “Just because I can’t keep up with you now doesn’t mean it would have been easy to keep up with me when I was younger.” With her left hand, she patted the top of the tiny child’s hand she held in her right. “Did I ever tell you about when I used to roller skate down the steps of the capitol building when I was a kid?”
Wide-eyed, the tiny child looked up at her, pondering what the words meant. She was a precocious little girl with shocking red hair and large blue eyes. Almost every inch of her face was covered with freckles, but none yet graced her shoulders or legs as they poked out from her pink summer dress. “No, Grandma,” she shook her head.
“Well, I did,” her grandmother nodded and then hurried her across the street. “And I never even broke any bones doing it.”
I remember that day as though it were only yesterday. I can only guess that I was about four at the time, and my grandmother (who stood almost six feet tall) towered over me. She wasn’t exactly fat or even chunky, but she was so well endowed I remembered wondering how she didn’t topple over from the extra weight. She had terrible back problems that she attributed directly to her chest size, and I figured that by the time I had come along, her back problems and the hard life of being a country woman in the backwoods south had taken its toll on her. I look back fondly on the stories she would tell me. I remember wondering for a very long time if they had all been true or not. My mother once told me that they were true, but she hadn’t always been known for telling the truth herself.
We had been on our way into Disney World that day. It had taken us a few days to drive all the way there from Arkansas, but she’d never been and was just as excited as my brother and I were. She always loved an adventure, but try as I might, I couldn’t imagine this behemoth of a woman roller skating down the stairs of a capitol building in downtown Little Rock, Arkansas.
“Did you fall down?” I innocently asked her.
“Nope, I never did,” she looked down at me as we neared the entrance gate to the park. “I practically lived my life on roller skates,” she grinned, lost in the fond memory. My tiny child brain whirred with mental images of her doing absolutely everything on roller skates.
“But what if you needed to walk up the stairs?” I stepped onto the curb in front of me, careful to place my foot under where I would shift my weight so that I didn’t stumble and fall.
“I could walk on my hands and would go up the stairs on my hands then.” She winked at me, holding my hand high in the air to steady me. Surely she was kidding me, I remember thinking.
“Really?” I squinted up at her, partially in disbelief and partly because the sun was right overhead, and it was nearly impossible to see her towering over me.
“Yes, really.”
“How old were you, Grandma? Were you a little girl? Like me?” We had walked into the shade of an old palm and I could look at her clearly.
“I guess I was about nine years old by then,” she grinned at the memory. “I was a bit of a daredevil. It was 1921, and a lot of things had changed. Women had only been able to vote for a year, and fashion was changing so much, and we were known as rebels.”
“What's a rebel,” I asked innocently enough.
“Someone who doesn’t do what is expected of them,” she chuckled. “And we definitely didn’t do that.”
“Am I a rebel, Grandma?” She studied me for only a split second before bursting into laughter. My socks didn’t match, my shoes were on the wrong feet that morning, my hair was uneven because I refused to sit still long enough for anyone to put it into proper pigtails on either side of my head, and I’d managed to spill milk all down the front of my dress but had refused to change my clothes before we left the hotel for the park that morning.
“I would have to say you certainly are,” she sobered and nodded. “You take after me.”
“Can you still go down the stairs in roller skates?” My mind was still trying to picture the whole scenario of this extremely tall woman flying down the stairs with no regard to what other people might think.
“That was a long time ago,” she smiled with a faraway look on her face. “I was a different person back then.”
“How long ago was it?” Typical of any four-year-old child, I had a million questions pop up in my mind for each question she answered.
“Well, let’s see now. That was sixty three years ago, Sweetie.”
“Wow,” I stared at her, wide-eyed, with absolutely no concept of how long ago sixty three years was. “Did you have friends?”
“I did,” she grinned, her memory tripping over the past in ways nobody could imagine. “I had quite a few friends, and some of them even skated with me.”
“Down the stairs?”
“Down the stairs.”
“Did they ever fall?”
“Yes, a couple of them did. But they didn’t get hurt much.”
“Why did you skate down the stairs?”
“Because there was nowhere else for us to roller skate.”
“But why?”
“Because people were protesting something or other.”
“But why?”
“Because that’s how people got the government’s attention back then.”
“But why?”
“You ask a lot of questions,” she was growing weary by the time we reached the ladies’ room. Not wanting to fatigue my grandmother, I took that suggestion as her request to stop asking so much and I took a deep breath instead.
“Sorry,” I told her, smiling up.
“It’s okay to ask questions,” she smiled down. “Just make sure that you’re ready for the answers you get when you do. You might not always like them.”
I’ll never forget that moment. My grandmother had a miraculous level of intelligence in her, but I’m not sure she knew those words would stick with me for the rest of my life. I pondered them as they bounced off the inside of my underdeveloped brain.
“Okay,” I acknowledged. “I will.” I’d given up on asking any more questions for the time being, but she had not finished entertaining her only granddaughter in true grandmotherly fashion. She sat me on the counter and wet a piece of a paper towel to wipe the stray bits of lunch from my pink cheeks.
“My friends and I would meet at the capitol building every day for a month so that we could wear pants and skate down the steps of the capitol building. There had been something called the Tulsa Race Riots, just one state over, and there were a lot of bad things happening. So a lot of people were going to the capitol to protest. I won’t tell you what the race riots were. You’re too young for that just yet, but your mom can tell you when you’re older. Anywho, we would go there to join the protests every day just for something to do. I didn’t understand it yet then, either. And when we would skate up and down the steps, we would hold the great big signs over our heads. People would either cheer us on by whooping and hollering at us, or they’d throw eggs at us. But we had fun, and we did something that other people said was important. I never fell and got hurt, but one of my friends did fall when someone threw a rock at her. She got hurt really badly, so she never went back to the capitol building with us. She never went anywhere with us again. Her family moved and she never even wrote me a letter.” Her eyes darkened and I saw a sadness flash across her face for a moment. “She was my best friend.”
“Oh,” I managed to squeeze out between swipes at my messy face. She’d mentioned quite a few things that I didn’t completely understand, but I knew better than to ask any questions anymore.
“I never had another friend like her in all my long life,” she finished.
“Do you miss her?” I couldn’t help it.
“I do. I still miss her.”
A stranger walked past us and into the bathroom stalls. I remember seeing her face as she smiled at my grandmother’s sentiment. There was something about missing a friend that brought together total strangers.
“But can’t you look for her?” I couldn’t resist the urge to ask questions about the mysterious friend.
“I did for many years, but when I found her, she was married and had children, and I didn’t want to scare her. So I left her alone.”
“But I think she missed you too,” I replied with genuine heart. “I know I would.”
“You’re sweet.” She smiled at me, kissed my forehead, and helped me down from the bathroom counter. “I would miss you too, but I wouldn’t ever stop looking for you, Sweetie.”
“I love you, Grandma,” I told her as I took her hand and we headed for the door.
“I love you too, Baby.” She pushed the door open and Smiled down at me with tears in her eyes. “I love you too.”
We were almost back to my mother by the time either of us spoke again. I tripped on the curb and made a headlong dive toward the pavement when her steady grip yanked me back up into the air and plopped me back on my feet.
“I was born the same day the Titanic sank, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I’m not going to let you go down, too.”
