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Sidelines Kalani Simpson |
Heart big enough
to W.I.N.HE'S a blur out there, painting a masterpiece on a frozen sheet. Thirteen-year-old William Nottingham has the small crowd mesmerized at the Ice Palace, the out-of-place old skating rink across the street from Aloha Stadium.
William Nottingham. You've heard that name, in these last few days. You've seen his face, on television. It seems like he's been on every channel, on the local evening news. Something about "Olympic potential." (We have ice skaters with Olympic potential?) The paper said he "trains in Hawaii three to four months of the year." (What? Do people do that?) But most of all, the stories were about stolen skates, and his mother pleading for their quick return, no questions asked.
But now, the skates, lost when his family's car was broken into in a shopping-center parking lot, have not returned in time, and his mom, Margarete, is "shaking in my bones" with fear. His ankles could break, and his toes, too, doing these doubles and triples with borrowed "boots" that don't fit. He's wearing ladies' skates, and they are too big, and they were made for ice dancing, not skating.
But he is brilliant.
To put it simply, he skates the way they do on TV, equal parts spirit and grace. And the jumps are incredible, and he competes with rare joy. This, it turns out, is something he needs as much as anyone who has ever laced up a skate.
Sometimes the best stories are brought to light by missing skates.
AT LAST HE comes off the ice, and he is surrounded by his mother's hug, but there is a TV camera watching and he is sheepish. "I'm not a little boy," he says, but of course in her heart she knows this is true, more than anyone, more even than he could realize himself. Very early in his life, she knows, too early, she says, he had already been forced to become "an old man in a little body."
And so his story begins not when he first found the ice, at age 7, when he skated those first two hours in joyful revelation, without falling once. But because he needed to.
He had always been such a serious boy, so weighed down with the worries of the world. He didn't play the way other kids did. He'd master his toys and move on. "He could never find his freedom," his mom says, "his peace."
So his story begins with why. It begins in Romania, where he is from, where he was born, and adopted by Margarete's mother, Cristina Ionita. "At the time he was my brother, actually," his mother says now.
Margarete had married, and moved to America. She'd been a U.S. citizen since 1986. So she didn't know it when her mother, back in Romania, had been hit with a major stroke. Nobody did, actually. Not until someone finally checked in on Cristina and found little William taking care of her, cooking for her and rubbing her arms and legs.
He was 3 1/2 years old.
He is asked if he remembers this, and William nods without a word.
What was that like for someone so young?
"Not really hard," he says.
IT WAS A year before Margarete and her husband, Dennis, were able to finally bring William home, to Alaska, and five more before they could adopt him officially and get his U.S. citizenship squared away. "Now he's with us," she says, the emotion catching in her voice. "He's our baby."
But he was still worried, still troubled, still old beyond his years. He couldn't be a regular kid. The world's problems affected him too much.
There were the two, three, four sets of winter clothes that mysteriously disappeared each year, until his parents finally got wise. It hit Margarete what was happening one day when she had bought William some beautiful new boots for another Alaska winter. He hit the parking lot ahead of her, and by the time she got outside the new boots were gone.
He had seen a boy at the mall with no shoes. "I took them off and went outside and gave them to him," he says simply. Even now, no other course of action even crosses his mind.
His mom is flushed with a strange combination of aggravation and pride when she tells the story.
Why did he give his brand new boots away? He'd told her he knew she could buy him another pair. "He found a resolution very fast," she says, with motherly sarcasm.
But there was also the year he gave away all of his toys to the Salvation Army, showing a hint of childhood only when he realized, at last, that it meant Buzz Lightyear would be going, too. And the time he was moved by a Thanksgiving TV commercial to donate his tooth-fairy money (at $20-$100 a pop, his tooth fairy is in a higher tax bracket than yours or mine) to buy $1,000 worth of holiday turkeys for a local mission. He was ecstatic.
But it was never long before he was serious again, and taking all the world's ills personally again, before he was back to being that 3 1/2-year-old who had actually cared for his sick grandmother all by himself. Before the old man returned.
So it was a little bit of a miracle that day when they had gone, on a whim, to a local rink, when he fell in love with skating and his heart soared as he glided on the ice. A local coach pounced immediately. This boy had something! And his parents were happy to let him take lessons. Anything to let him be a kid.
Their jaws dropped three months later when the big competition came. One, he was great. Two, they had somehow assumed that all this time he'd been playing hockey. But he loved it, and he won.
He's won the Northwest Pacific Region championship six times. And some who have watched him skate say the Olympics are not out of reach.
But most of all, at last, he had found his freedom. On the ice, he had found his peace.
SO WHY IS he here? Well, it is very cold in Alaska. And you get injuries when you skate six hours a day, you just do. And it is very cold in Alaska.
And somewhere along the line someone suggested that his body might heal better if his legs spent a few months in the sun.
And so he rehabilitates, and he runs in the sand and he soaks in the sun. He is up at 3, on the ice by 5. And though this is the second time he's lost equipment to car break-ins (Waikele Premium Outlets has offered $500 toward the replacement of William's $1,970 skates) his Hawaii training program is working.
On the 24th of this month, he returns to Alaska, where William's grandma has joined them now, from Romania. And this ending is a happy one. "She does lots of things for me," William says of his grandma. "And I do the same for her."
Margarete is asked her mother's last name, and she writes it out. "It is William's middle name," she says, and prints it, all caps: WILLIAM IONITA NOTTINGHAM. "He needs to remember," she says, "Grandma adopted him."
And he is warmed suddenly, at this. "So my initials are," he says, pointing to the notebook, "W.I.N."
The smile is barely there, but his eyes light up, and at last he looks like a kid. One whose heart is usually too big and whose soul is too old, and who is often far too serious, true. But not for this moment. He's a boy again, now, and tears come to his mother's eyes.
It is skating that has given him his youth back.
"I am so proud of you," she says, grabbing his arm. "I am so proud of you."
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Kalani Simpson can be reached at ksimpson@starbulletin.com
