Going in Circles

On a clear day, if the wind was right, you could hear the music from the ice skating rink down on Route 2. We would hang our skates around our necks, bundle up with gloves, scarves, and hats and trek down the street and across the four lane highway for a morning of skating and watered down hot chocolate.

It wasn't a fancy skating rink, just something thrown together for the kids - a circular metal fence around a layer of manufactured ice - with a machine for coffee and hot chocolate, an attendant who rented skates, and taped music. By noon, it was generally packed. Parents watched from outside the fence as the little kids took their first steps and teenagers sailed around backwards trying to impress each other, but most of us kept to the fence and went in endless circles, never having learned how to pirouette or stop without falling.

Sometimes though, we would see a real skater, someone who stayed in the uncrowded center, someone who could jump and turn in mid air, then land gracefully and spin, someone who could make a dead stop on a dime with a small shower of ice from their blades. Those skaters wore tights and short skirts or flowing trousers and silk shirts open at the throats and they never seemed to feel the cold. Instinctively we gave them room on the ice and watched them in awe. It was what we all wanted to be.

One of those skaters was a thin, pretty girl with long, red, curly hair. She flew on the ice, light on her feet and always smiling, red hair flying out behind her. Her name was Tina Noyes and by 1967 her practice had paid off and she had become a world championship figure skater. She performed with the likes of Dick Button and Peggy Fleming and my daddy took me to see her at the Boston Garden once - I watched in amazement and wonder as she took to the ice, solo, with a spotlight following her and her red hair flowing around her like an aura. She had become her dream. Being a hometown girl, the crowd went wild as she finished - roses were thrown on the ice, everyone stood and the applause was deafening. She stood on center ice, a slim girl in silver and white with a blaze of red hair and she smiled and took a bow. She sparkled with sequins and success.

See there, my daddy told me, and you thought going in circles could never get you anywhere.