Strange reminders



It's a funny, funny thing: I went to bed last night thinking of my father's laugh. It was clear as a bell in my head. I said out loud in my half-sleep state, "I tried to save you, you know." Then I fell into the dark pool of sleep for 6 hours.



I get up, get to the rink (in a cab since it was raining), and what pops on? A perfect edit of the love theme from Ice Castles. My dad used to bug me when this movie was on tv. "It's on again, you know. You had a dress just like it." And he was right, although I couldn't see it until about 5 years ago. My grammar school uniform looked exactly like the navy blue dress in the film.



The song was playing for a little girl who digs the rhinestones glued to my skates. We've had many conversations about this, why my skates are beige and hers are white, and what does coffee taste like because she's never had any. I think she must be about 8 or 9, tops. Her father takes her almost every Wednesday and Thursday, and her interpretive program is to this popular clunker sung by Melissa Manchester. Rink rats are weird creatures, almost none of us know each other's names, and yet we're involved (however marginally) in each other's lives. She went through her program (nice layback, too) and went to turn it off. Well, we leaped to the cd changer to keep it going! All of a sudden there were about five "Lexie Winstons" on the ice. (That was the girl in the movie.) Spinning, spirals, just total hams we were! This poor girl just looked at us like why do people do that when this comes on? Ah, the power of Lexie and at 6:30 am, to boot...



The session ends and I sit, drying off my blades. As if on cue, she takes my skate in her tiny hands and holds it up to the light. "I love when it twinkles," she said, referring to the rhinestones. And then, the strangest thing: her coach says to her, "Ya know when it's time to go to the dentist?" She shakes her head. I get a chill.



"When it's tooth hurty." (2:30, ha ha ha.) My father used to tell me that joke over and over.



I begin to smile, her father is hysterical, and she tilts her head to one side and says, "I don't get it." With that, we start to roar. A nice start to a rotten day.



It's amazing sometimes: my old man gone 3 years almost. If I didn't know better, I'd say he's listening.



You're still a crazy goat, Thomas Francis!