When my mom was in high school, she wasn’t popular or anything. Anyways.
So a group of kids decided they wanted to go ice skating but they couldn’t get a ride, so these kids told my mom that if she could get them all a ride to the skating rink, she could come too.
Well she asked her dad, and he said that they could go and they piled all these kids into the car and they headed off to the skating rink and my mom was telling my grandpa how he didn’t have to wait around for them to be done and that the session was over in about three hours or so.
But nah
He was just: “Actually, I think I’ll try skating, I should really try to learn.”
So my mom was horrified, her dad was going to be trying to learn how to ice skate and embarrass her in front of everyone. The guys thought it was funny to get to see an old man fall on his ass all night so they were all for it.
Well my mom and a couple other girls didn’t terribly know how to skate either so they edged around the side of the rink and my grandpa was right with them, inching along.
Well one of the guys thought it would be funny to slide toward the girls and kick ice up at them and my grandpa told him that wasn’t an approrpiate way to treat the girls and told him to stop it.
Little bastard said something flippant my mom can’t remember but she summarized it as essentially being ‘kiss my ass’ and skated off.
My grandpa looked at my mom and the rest of the girls, and told them to never, ever let anybody, let alone boys treat them like that and like that he was GONE.
See
thing my mom and none of these kids knew was that my grandpa knew how to ice skate, actually. The man was the star player on his highschool hockey team.
He skated right up to the boy and stopped abruptly, which ended up causing the boy to fall on his ass and told him to never, ever treat anyone like that ever again, and had him go over and apologize to my mom and the other girls for his horrible behavior. Of course he then spent the rest of the evening skating backwards and sideways and doing fancy maneuvering around the rink, as the jig was up.
But later, my mom realized that he stayed at the rink and pretended he couldn’t skate because he didn’t trust the other kids to behave themselves and wanted to be there to protect his daughter. So he spent all that time barely inching along, wobbling and pretending to struggle so he could stay with my mom and make sure she was going to be treated alright by the popular kids.