The Wizard (Part 2)

Back to Skate City...

The '80's rolled along and skating and I went with it. Some strange new things came along with all the prosperity at our little rink...the need for an off-duty deputy to keep the peace was one. There was an armed, uniformed officer working every Friday and Saturday night to quell the parking lot fights, kick out or keep out the drunk teenagers and be a presence...just in case. They had their hands full some nights since we were open from 7 till 1 am and that's a lot of time for stuff to happen in the restrooms and behind the building. There was a cemetery right next to the parking lot that they had to keep an eye on too. A whole bunch of cheap beer got slugged down among the tombstones on a detour from the cars to the admission window. We had to go rescue one of our patrons one night when he had a couple too many, leaned on a headstone, knocked it over and pinned both arms under about a thousand pounds of marble. It kept the security guys busy and amused.

Something else new was a urethane floor coating that finally (sort of) got rid of the rosin dust. We put it down one summer and did it all wrong. Who knew anything? Everybody was giddy from the fumes and we ran out before we got it all coated. The owners tried to stretch it as much as possible so it went on thin and streaky. It peeled almost immediately and made for some treacherous corners but at least it wasn't bare wood.

At some point we also acquired a new DJ who wound up with the name Dangerous Dan. He was open to more kinds of music than Flash but had a tendency to play what he liked instead of what we could skate to. A couple of local AM radio jocks played there occasionally as well...Charlie, Joel...last names escape me but they brought their own stacks of 45's and we learned. Somebody heard that you could mix songs together and make new ones if you had two turntables (which we just happened to have) so suddenly we had twenty minute versions of 'Rappers Delight' stitched into 'Good Times' and 'Another One Bites The Dust'. It was probably awful but we were the rankest of amateurs working on a mixer board with rotary pots and a crossfader that nobody knew how to use. We loved it.

Private parties became a thing that we did on weeknights. They ran the gamut from church groups to frat parties.
The former were some of the biggest nights we had bar none. They could pack the place and at the very least tended not to destroy the bathrooms.
One of the latter comes to mind when a Cornell science department showed up with a cooler full of lab-made 200 proof alcohol. We didn't know about it until after the first broken wrist and the total redecoration of the restrooms. It was bad...very bad.

There were open session Christmas parties, Halloween parties, you name it. 

The joint was jumping. I worked sometimes from 1pm till 3am. Skate guard a matinee, clean the place in between and then open back up for the night session. Clean it up as best we could after we closed at 1 and then, more often than not, go hit Sambo's Restaurant (how politically incorrect is that name now?) for all-you-could-eat fried shrimp and fries. It was a wonderful, awful time.

I kept learning new stuff on skates from wherever I could pick it up. Out-of-town skaters started showing up now and again with their own crazy moves and steps. Packs of kids from Pennsylvania showed what shuffling in a pack looked like. We had a few freestylers and artistic types and they were pretty amazing to watch but the formality of it never really caught my interest that much. 

I stole some of the jumps and turns but I was bound to be a true session skater even way back then. I tinkered with all kinds of weird wheels since I got them cheap on my employee discount. Gone were the impossibly hard 'All Americans' and 'Fomacs'. In their place there was a set of speed wheels, then a set of 'Roller Bones', even a short-lived set that actually looked like red softballs...interesting but pretty awful for edges. I've got boxes of old wheels in the garage still.

For all of it though, I really didn't know much about skating itself. I started seeing a couple of magazines about skaters instead of the trade rags from the RSROA and in them were pictures of huge rinks packed with people all over the country. Skating was big stuff and we didn't even realize it. Our horizons were getting a lot broader than the little place on Judd Falls Road.

I can't remember when we did it or where we went but at some point, a bunch of us loaded into some very iffy vehicles and went to another rink. Syracuse or Binghamton is likely because it wasn't that far but suddenly there was a lot more out there. Rinks were all over the place and we traveled whenever we could. 

Everywhere I went, I picked up a little more...another move or another song and kept on learning. 

By now, farming was pretty much gone and I worked almost full time at Skate City. I spent days rehabilitating wrecked rental skates that should have been retired years ago. There was endless, hopeless cleaning to do. The restrooms were a catastrophe almost every night. The rug soon got torn and the owners wouldn't replace it. There was a lot of buzzing about the same owners and very young girls after the sessions. A story went around about one of them looking down the barrel of a revolver held by a very irate father. The holes in in the endeavor were starting to show through in more places than the carpet.

But threadbare as it was becoming, I was still there. Wizard was my sort-of official name because well...everybody had to have one. Then one day, another rumor became a fact...we were moving. The same less-than-reputable operators had decided to quit leasing the building (or the owners threw them out...never knew for sure) and buy a place across town.

Now my time was divided between helping to get the new place ready and running the old one in the interim. The saga of Roller World was underway. That's the next chapter...

The Hope Tree

 Once upon a time, I planted an oak tree. I read somewhere that "He who plants a tree plants hope" and I desperately needed a little hope.

It was a tough time back then and dark. My marriage of over 20 years was slowly and painfully falling apart. My kids were growing up and moving on with college and lives of their own. But I read that line...I don't even remember where, and somehow it rang a bell.

Fairly often, I used to walk up on the hill behind my house to clear my head and calm my shaky self when I wasn't working. Home was a place full of turmoil so sometimes I'd just walk. I remember thinking at times that the house itself must have been evil because so much bad had happened there. So I'd walk.

I can't remember how or why but one day while I was trudging along, I spotted a tiny little oak twig with just two leaves on it poking out of the brush along the road. It looked so fragile and small but there it was...two green leaves on a six inch stick holding it's own against the thorns, goldenrod and burdocks. In some crazy part of my mind, I thought it looked defiant. In a leap that I still can't explain, it looked like hope.

So I went home, got a garden spade and carefully dug the little guy up. I didn't know what to do with it but after walking around the yard puzzling for a while, I picked a spot sort of in the middle of the vast, unused expanse of grass in the front and dug a tiny hole to plant it. It looked completely lost and alone out there, far from the spot where some squirrel had probably buried an acorn and its almost transparent leaves first caught the sunshine. But I pulled some of the crabgrass away from it, put a ribbon on a stick next to it so I wouldn't accidentally run over it with the lawn mower and crossed my fingers.

At that moment, it became my Hope Tree.

I really didn't think it would make it I suppose. I didn't do much except mow around it and pull the weeds that tried to choke it out. A winter passed and to my surprise, that little stick put out four leaves. The rabbits or a deer ate a couple of them and I thought that was it but by summertime, there were a couple more.

Winters and summers came and went. I walked up on the hill less and rode bicycles more. The Tour became a thing and kept me occupied enough to keep moving through some bad times. I didn't think about hope much.

I'd mow the grass around my twig and water it once in a while when summers got dry. Sometimes I'd just walk out there and check on it...shoo the Japanese beetles off and see how it was doing. Four leaves became a dozen and I no longer needed the ribbon to see where it was when I cut the grass. To my delight every spring, what looked like a dead stick stuck in the ground would pop out some buds and turn green again. I never so much as put a fence around it to keep the bunnies and deer away from it but there it was...still defiant.

So now, all these years later, the little tree is almost what could be called a sapling. It put down roots and true to its kind, keeps growing slowly but steadily. It's holding it's own among a bunch of other trees we've planted since. Someday, there will be a grove of companions...maples, other oaks, hopefully a sycamore or two, some birch and a few black walnuts that the squirrels keep planting for me.

But that one feisty little oak in the middle will be my Hope Tree always. Without knowing why or how, it filled one small empty place in my life when the whole world was black.

My favorite twig has gotten to be a couple of feet tall now. I think the runt of the litter is here to stay for well and all and that makes me happy. I know I will never see it reach its fullest size but I hope someday to walk in its shade and look up at it instead of down. I can picture it in my mind, grown to a tower with a vast crown of leaves and branches, full of birds and giddy squirrels, spreading out huge and giving life to that empty useless lawn. 

Once upon a time I planted an oak tree. It became a symbol of so many things to me...hanging on when I thought I couldn't, watching for a new start every season when everything looked finished, seeing something green again when the black was everywhere. 

And I want my kids to know I did that and why. I began something that will live long after I've gone. It won't live forever anymore than I will but it'll be a memory of something I did for many, many years. From something so small, came something so big. 

Life, memories and a little bit of the future.

It is a Hope Tree after all.