Winter Olympics over, members of the family voted for favorite events.
The daughters chose figure skating, no surprise. But this Dad’s last choice. My remembrance of my one jump and spin was horizontal instead of vertical. I still feel the first—and last—time I tried to skate on ice. Makes my tailbone ache. Skiing also made my tailbone hurt, plus I had to scrape lots of snow off my rump.
That ski and shoot event looked interesting, until they strapped their rifles on their back and started flailing ski poles. Ruined what looked like a good shooting match.
Ice hockey? When I was in grammar school, Dad took me to Tulsa. And his big boss took us to see ice hockey.
Went back to Hamlin, keyed on my roller skates, borrowed Mom’s broom, started pushing the tennis-ball-can cap around the concrete tennis court. Smart enough to make it out of grammar school and also figure out roller-skate ‘hockey’ was a bad idea.
Best of events gotta be curling. No need for judges who probably already have their minds made up.
When the ‘curler’ quits kneeling…I could do that…then the sweepers wearing tennis shoes without stiletto blades make the ice whiter. What ‘stones’ you see left in the circle is what you get. And you can count the winnings on your fingers.
Also the sweepers don’t move down the ice any faster than I can move my walker. Do worry if those Swedes are taunting our team as they yell in their foreign language.
My son also voted for curling. Said the good thing about curling—he’s sometime a bit of the prodigal son—is that the winners buy the beer.
Image by Robert Przybysz at Shutterstock
