One day when I was playing around the yard after school, my Father came in his car and picked me up. I was quite surprised to see him and wondered what he wanted. I soon discovered he wanted to do something nice for me. He took me downtown and bought me my first pair of roller skates and a ring. The ring was a blue sapphire, my birthstone. With my customary carelessness, I lost the ring the very next day in the sand pile under my apple tree and, though I spent many hours of my childhood looking for that ring, I never found it.
The roller skates fared better. By the time Mother got home from work at five o'clock, I could skate "real fast" on them and went flying into her arms as she came up the walk. She could hardly believe that I could learn that quickly, and I was very proud and pleased.
And how I loved to skate! I spent hours going up and down the block. A half block of very smooth sidewalk, highly superior for skating, was around the corner and out of bounds. This often tempted me until I got spanked for the digression one day.
I used to skate to school and did so much skating that I wore the skates out. At least I lost a wheel. Robert was not as great a fixer as he was a protector, and I thought for awhile I would have to give up skating. Then I figured out a solution. I wound a piece of string around the place where the wheel should have been to hold the other wheel in place. Thus I could skate on three wheels.
This was hard on the string, though, and it wore out very fast. Because I had to have a new piece of string every day, I stopped at the corner grocery store each morning to beg a piece of string. I did not feel welcome, but the store keeper never actually refused me. For weeks and months I continued with my three-wheel skate.
Years later when I was in high school and had completely forgotten about my three wheel skate, I went to a skating party held by the Latin Club at a skating rink. I was lonely and very unsure of myself at social functions. The only reason I had dared to go to the party was because the Latin teacher knew my brother, Robert, and was trying to help me adjust to his loss and to high school.
This was, however, my first experience with a skating rink, and I was immediately caught up in the motion, the music, and the feel of the air rushing by. The strangers faded from my awareness, and I merged into the delight of the experience.
Suddenly the music stopped, and I looked up to see what was happening to cause it. Imagine how surprised I was to discover I had won first place in a skating contest! I hadn't even known we were having a contest! A three wheel skate could have been to my skating skill what Demosthenes's stone was to his speaking skill.
I lost my Father as I lost my ring. He died of pernicious anemia when I was eight years old. I remember the bell tolling at the cemetery as his funeral procession wound slowly up the hill. "He was only fifty years old," I heard some grown up say, and the bell tolled fifty times.
Any jeweler can tell you that a sapphire ring stands for clear thinking. Is it because I lost that ring that I live by my heart instead of my head? My father was gone from me forever, but early in the dim reaches of my childhood which I cannot recall, he planted seeds of love which have engulfed my life. Reason and logic are important because they help my heart find deeper truths; but always, in the final analysis, I must accept Truth on the basis of feeling far deeper than sheer logic can penetrate. The magic of motion on the rink was a greater reality to me than the victory which I achieved.