26th Confession

So last week, I attended one of my son Edan's friend's birthday party at a roller skating rink.  Amazingly enough, even after about nine years off of skates, I escaped with most of my dignity intact after a rough start. 

Not that it was my first time on skates; far from it, actually.  When I was smaller, Mom and Dad took my sister and me to roller skating rinks often; how often I cannot say.  A child's memory is a capricious creature at best: fanciful and full of whimsy, often forgiving and forgetting portions.  Mine, I'm afraid, is much too full of holes to be any kind of reliable witness.  But I recall the place as best I can: in shades of twilight and garish colors, punctuated by glaring strobes and synthesized music, the tinny 8-bit music of the arcade in the background.

It was to this roller rink that I had my first "date" when I was...six?  Seven, perhaps?  I recall it was with Michelle, a classmate of mine in New York, and I was very young indeed.  I remember holding hands during the couple skate, that Dad was our chaperone, that I had no earthly idea why this girl couldn't keep up with me, and I think I recall that I accidentally held her hand too tightly.  Thankfully, I learned many things by the time I had my second date, and that one went much more smoothly; her hand didn't ache at the end of from my grip.

My earliest recollections of skating oddly enough are not on skates of my own, but rather from a Charlie Chaplin short: The Rink made an indelible impression on little five-year-old Ryan.  The speed and grace with which he rolled around the rink, swinging around poles and knocking poor fat Eric Campbell down with his cane, and Chaplin hooking onto a car at the end of the short were all intoxicating and filled my head with all kinds of skating imaginations.  Unfortunately, the closest I got to anything remotely resembling that in the film was falling down a lot, and sometimes pulling down the person by whom I was skating by their arm.

And now, a good twenty-odd years later, the scene has changed.  The music is less Bowie and more country.  The rink has seen better days.  They play the awful Chicken Dance.  And the arcade has fewer "pure" games and more games based on tickets and tokens.  The day afterward, I have a deep gash above my ankle from where the plastic of the skate rubbed through my sock.

But during the free skate, while Edan was not out on the rink (he inherited his father's susceptibility to arcade games), I was out on the rink and the DJ started playing the Bangles' "Walk Like an Egyptian."  I sped up my skating just a little bit, felt the wind blow through my hair, and for just a couple minutes, I was eight again.  The skates didn't hurt, the thrill was seeing how quickly I could go around the rink on these wheels, and I could feel a foolish grin plaster itself on my face. 

May we all never grow up so much, that simple things like wind fail to bring back some measure of joy in our lives.