Past Blasts or Blasts from the Past

Daughter used to be a competitive skater. Not on ice but on in line roller skates. She had a coach she met with 6 days a week and the training was intense. About 8 skaters were in this club and it was a part of her life that now years gone by brings back memories of these people that she has contacted using Facebook. She has reconnected with them through Facebook and the chat application there.

When she skated and practiced all year, her dance routine and freestyle routines; competition season would eventually start. We traveled to Cheyenne, Wyo., Greeley, Colorado, Colorado Springs and the other places escape my memory. I do remember these were usually scheduled during the winter months and driving through a blizzard to get there wasn't unusual.

She dressed in her club dress to do her school house figures, a different dress to do her dance routine and yet another dress to do her freestyle. Freestyle skating was all about glitter and glitz on the dresses. Sit spins, camels, mapes, loops and attitude worked their way into her routines for freestyle and this was both her and my favorite part of the competitions. I cheered on the young ladies that were competing from our skate club. If my daughter couldn't medal then I hoped someone from the club would metal. We had tears, tantrums, anxiety, depression and joy; we just never knew which skater would indulge in what emotion. Good times, good memories now that the stress of competition is in the past.

I too have had one of these skaters connect with me. Ah, the memories of that time and place. Most of them are scattered around the USA; a few are still in Casper, Wyoming and I'm sure their children have attended the same skating rink they spent so much time practicing and just skating for fun on Friday nights. They now have children that are grown but in my mind when I envision them, I think of them as 16 yr. old young ladies twirling across the rink, their slim healthy athletic bodies able to drop down into a sit spin, one leg beneath them and one extended horizontally out above the floor while they spin and spin and spin and then stand back up and do yet another maneuver in their routines.. Now that requires some strength in the legs and what fine legs they had. Daughter couldn't buy a pair of pants to fit her waist that weren't' too tight on her thighs. Thigh muscles were over developed. If her thighs fit in a pair of jeans, the waist was always too big. These girls were in the best shape of their lives.

I was in charge of costumes for the daughter. Her club dress was for the school house figures, one competiton but she had to have a dress for dance and another for freestyle. Hand sewn and hand beaded, we tried to be innovative and unique and most of the time we succeeded.

Reconnecting with these people from Casper brings floods of memories from that time and place in our lives; reconnecting with my school mates and cousins from WV causes more memories from that area of the USA. After years and years of being gone from both places, it's eerie and pleasant at the same time to reconnect into their lives and see them after a 20yr interval; grown up in some cases, grown old in some cases and some delivering news that some of them aren't with us any longer.

I'm not big on posting on Facebook although I do have a Facebook account. I'm amazed at the connection part of it. Connecting with people you haven't thought about in years or you have thought about but had no idea where or what they were doing.

Facebook, though I don't post a lot, I do view and marvel at you!