Skater Boy - Coming of Age Part IX

Title: Skater Boy – Coming of Age

Part IX

Matthew has always been into languages.  His German course was one of his favorite classes in home schooling.  Who taught him?  Well, he has a college professor Aunt who teaches German and has a PhD in the language.  Aunt Joy has lectured at Harvard and her paper on Antarctica was featured at an event in Britain.  But Aunt Joy did not teach him German because she was only in high school at the time.  Matthew took German from Rosetta Stone... which was a computer program... not the actual stone.  A talking stone would be weird!  Anyway, I learned something from the program.  I learned that an airplane is called “Flugzeug” which sounds cooler than its spelling, TRUST ME!!  Matthew had a German friend in the ice skating world and she said the program wasn’t doing a very good job.  Oh, well. 

In college, Matthew took Greek (language of the New Testament) and Hebrew (language of the Old Testament) in the same semester!  Yipe!  He liked them both but it was too much, so he dropped Greek the next semester to the disappointment of his teacher!  What Matt’s love of languages have to do with figure skating?  Three Christmases ago Matthew went to Britian to skate with a Russian Ice Skating Troupe and very few of them spoke any English!

Matthew called us very excited in November.  There was a Russian Ice Skating company doing a show in England and they were down a skater.  He had been recommended and they had called him!  Matthew’s ice skating friends told him that the usual progression in ice shows was Disney and THEN the Russians.  Excitedly, Matt got his passport around and headed out over to Britain.  We were waiting with bated breath but when Matt finally got to talk to us, it wasn’t good news.  The director didn’t speak English and she wanted him to figure things out fast!  “I don’t know if I can do this, Dad!” he said, discouraged.  He explained to me what was going on.  “How do you know what you are supposed to do?  Doesn’t anyone speak English?”  “Um... a few people do,” he replied.  “I am learning a lot of Russian swear words.  But I’m going to get a recording of the show and I think that will help me understand!”  Matt didn’t quit and he began to understand what they wanted.  He wasn’t the star but he was a wood cutter.  That doesn’t sound important but the story he was doing was Snow White, the Russian version, in which there are wood cutters instead of dwarves.  Matt’s part required a lot of synchronized ice skating with the other wood cutters and that is not easy! 

After a very condensed show practice schedule they began to perform two shows a day AND they would practice in the morning every day!  Matt spent hours skating day after day, with little free time and only three days off!  But he loved it!  Well...  he missed having Christmas with our family!  Christmas is a big holiday in our family and it was hard having Matt so far away!  Still we got to Skype with him on Christmas day and that was fun!  He did get Christmas off but the trains weren’t running, so he couldn’t go to London or see anything.  Matt made friends in the cast and spent Christmas with them!  He learned the director liked him, even if it didn’t seem like it early on.  I think the whole experience was it a huge confidence boost for Matt.  It was a whole different level of skating and once again (like when he first came to Ithaca), he was one of the weakest skaters there, but he grew and rose to the challenge!

We put an article in our community paper about it and people in the area were very proud that a boy from Troupsburg was performing in England!  Our family was proud of him too!  Matt had been to many competitions but this was different.  He was far away from home skating with professionals who expected him to rise to the occasion... and he had!   

This is the very essence of the “Coming of Age” story.  The hero is far from home and teachers, in a challenging environment.  Initially things look bad for the hero but then he turns things around!  He makes friends and is able to perform the tasks that have been set before him!  Also, typical of the “Coming of Age” story, becoming the star is not always success in such genre.  Being able to function well in the adult world is the point and Matt passed that test with flying colors! 

*** Author Adrian Essigmann has eighteen books in print on Amazon.com, soon to be nineteen!  All of them are $.99 cents on Kindle, with the exception of “An Assumed Risk” which will be (Lord willing) an e-book before summer.  All of his books are available in soft cover too!  Type Amazon Adrian Essigmann and his author’s page should come up ***

Book of the Week – “Life, Liberation, and the Pursuit of Video Games”  If you’re a kid I would describe it as SAO meets Dystopian literature!  (Sword Art Online)  If you are an adult I would say it is more a modern Dystopian novel.  In the old ones, there is little the hero can do against the machine they are caught in.  Take Fahrenheit 451, where the hero merely escapes robot dogs (like a normal person) instead of blasting them with a rocket launcher.  He manages to go be with other book worms (like me:) and spends his time memorizing works of literature so that they will be preserved.  How about the main character in 1984.  He pathetically works out in his State mandatory session in front of the TV instead, a mere cog in a massive wheel.  The Rocky or Karate Kid music doesn’t hit and our hero rips his shirt off to do pull ups out of the camera’s view.  Deep in the night, our massively muscled hero, breaks into his work place, and beats up five hundred guards, who all forget they have guns!  Blowing up the building, he walks off with a ripped up tee-shirt, his arm around a beautiful girl, muttering, “Double speak that!”  Even conservative icon, Ayn Rand’s hero in Anthem, Equality only manages to escape the repressive society he lives in.  His realization of the need to escape is the reaction to the “light bulb”.  Can you imagine if Equality had discovered the “M-16”?  His epiphany might have gone MUCH differently!  You say, “There is a big difference between a light bulb and an M-16!”  Is there?  It’s not like he discovered the wheel or even the concept of a bicycle!  A light bulb is a fairly advanced piece of technology, no matter how normal it may seem to us.  Even more modern Dystopian Novels like “The Giver”, “The City of Ember”, and “The Host” (okay, the Host is more alien invasion, but it is still very close to Dystopian Genre conventions) the heroes merely escape or survive.  My novel is more like the Modern Dystopian novels where the hero has the power to fight the machine and maybe... just maybe... win!!  It is $.99 cents on Kindle!