Kristin Nord Writes: When Skating Away WAS the Way

Youngsters Pose at Izzy-Dorry's Roller Rink in New Ulm Minnesota; Photographer Flip Schulke. Commons, Wikimedia; Still Picture Records Section, Special Media Archives Services Division

By Kristin Nord

We had moved that spring from Appalachia – not the pastoral region around Lexington, KY, but the truly hardscrabble region that would launch Lyndon Johnson’s War on poverty. My father had been fulfilling his military service by working as a psychiatrist on an experimental prison — a place inhabited by young boys who had been caught stealing cars or selling moonshine. Their greatest sin, I would conclude later, was poverty. And as my little brother in his cowboy suit would sidle up to them, and refer to them as “My friends, the inmates” I think he was on to something.

The trip East had been prompted by my father’s decision to leave the Public Health Service and set up a private practice in proximity to relatives and so we made the trip, passing over hills and hollers populated by characters on porches Dorothea Lange would have been drawn to, looking skeletal and sad in their calico dresses. And as it was spring, it was a time of slowly emerging leaves and soft breezes.

Landing on Long Island, NY was not unlike landing on Pluto. Daily life felt speeded up, as if the horses on a child’s carousel had broken free — and were galloping away of their own volition. And of course once we landed my father encountered financial sticker shock; he had planned to set aside money for all of us children to go to college so that we would not have to work the multiple jobs he’d worked. And so he took on moonlighting jobs at social service institutions, and his early morning drives were soon leading to long days, and late nights. We all missed him terribly.

My first introduction to school was in a town which clearly valued ambition and achievement, and I grew silent with my still- present Kentucky accent, in a class where the children felt justified in challenging their teachers, and where, “I Object! I Object!” seemed to be the common refrain.

A lot of my classmates had school after school, and could read backwards. They were obviously being trained in Talmudic academic inquiry, but I was a kid from a white bread Presbyterian background. I would be going to my uncle’s church just a couple of towns away on Sundays, and singing in Mrs. Rose’s choir in my red robe and starched white collar. I would take my cues from her in the reverse mirror, fascinated for some reason by the Band-aids on each arthritic hand.

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Kristin Nord Writes: When Skating Away WAS the Way

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