Round and Round We Go
I was crazy about roller skating when I was a kid. My mother? Not so much. Her ankles were weak, or so she said whenever I begged her to take me to the roller rink. I half-suspect now that she just couldn’t stand the music, or perhaps it was the monotony of going around and around in circles.
Me? I loved it. Even as an adult, I find rollerskating to be one of the more fun ways to get exercise.
Unfortunately, the local roller rink is as bad as the one my mother took me to. It’s crowded with pimple-faced teenagers trying to strike a pose that makes them look cool enough to hang out wearing skates they’re too cool to use. The music is mostly unintelligible lyrics set to a heavy base hip hop beat that seems less conducive to skating than to the group head-bobbing thing that goes on throughout each song.
Which is why I don’t take my son there, even though I’ve been dying to teach him how to roller skate.
This past weekend, I lucked out at a garage sale and found two pairs of roller skates: one for each of us. The price was too good to resist, so I bought them with the plan of teaching him how to skate in our cul de sac.
Big mistake.
At seven years old, he’s just enough socially aware to recognize how silly he looked after I’d duct-taped a pillow onto his rear end and refused to be seen outside suffering such an indignity.
So I did what my own mother did before me: I backed the cars out of the garage, set up a radio in there and told him we’d made our own roller rink. I even offered to serve snacks once he’d made it around the garage a dozen times without falling.
One thing I didn’t consider: how hard it can be to learn to skate on old garage floors. Ours is mostly smooth cement, but with two rather large, prominent cracks running smack down the center. Each time he was halfway through a circuit he’d encounter one of the cracks and, sure enough, wound up needing that pillow to cushion his fall.
After a while I did manage to teach him to hop a little when he came to the cracks. By the end of the day he’d actually made it around a dozen times, but it proved to be a far more frustrating experience for him than I remembered enduring when I was a kid. Of course, my husband has since said we ought to just tile the floor, but I don’t think I’d ever be willing to fork that kind of money over for a garage when my kitchen’s been in need of new tile for years.
Which is not to say that he’s given up roller skating altogether. In fact, we just came back inside from another 30 minute session doing circles in our garage while listening to one of his favorite Disney CDs. I’m sure my neighbors — who were outside raking leaves in their yard — wondered what on earth was making all of the thumps and giggles in my garage.
I’m not going to tell them about our private roller rink. Unless they’re willing to pay $1 admission, that is.
5 Responses to “Round and Round We Go”
you didn’t…. you didn’t REALLY tape a pillow to him right?
Oh the indignities suffered at the hands of the well intended mom.
Yeah, I did. Next time, I won’t. Indignity? Sure. But not nearly as much of one as having a doctor try fixing a broken tailbone (as I can tell you from personal experience).
My love of moving around with wheels on my feet is tempered by three things, cheifly:
I associate my Rollerblades both with the beard on my chin and the woman in my life. The former, because whilst trying to learn adequately how to move around, one of my skates hit a rock, and I ended up in the emergency room with ten stitches in my chin. I couldn’t shave, so I grew a beard. Now I can’t shave it off, because of the latter.
When Red and I first started dating, one of the things we did a lot was go rollerblading together in one of the very large parks that this city offers (over 16 miles of paved trails, God I love Oregon). There were quite a number of times that whizzing along the trails turned into something quite a bit more intimate back in the bushes.
The last thing I associate skating with isn’t nearly so pleasant. I grew up in a church that forbade dancing in couples as being something akin to hawking one’s soul on eBay. Their solution to the obvious problem in allowing some kind of sanctioned couples activity that wasn’t dancing involved rollerskates, school gymnasium floors (clockwise, always clockwise), and John Phillip Sousa played at earsplitting volumes. Oh, the memories.
Yesterday at WalMart I saw they have a sort of Heelie with two wheels for $30.
My mom has two little puppies (not so little anymore, 6 months old but still babies) and she had her garage sealed so she can take them out there to use piddle pads instead of outside where there’s a giant anthill whose ants get into the puppies fur and are almost impossible to get out. With the nice gray epoxy sealant with black and white and gray sprinkles on, it looks good, dog pee won’t soak into the cement (neither will salt, oil, slush, etc) and the sprinkles make it non slip. That would probably be less expensive than tiling…
Definitely less expensive! I’ve thought about moving our cats’ litter box out there and adding a cat door between the garage and the rest of the house, but then I worry about opening the garage door sometime when one of them is out there. One of the cats I wouldn’t miss too much (Butch), but I’m pretty sure if my husband was pulling into the garage he’d make sure he didn’t miss either of them.
Yeah, he hates my cats.
WG, I think we went to the same church! Ours turned the coffee reception room into a skating rink on Halloween every year so the kids had something “non-evil” to do instead of Trick or Treating. We skated clockwise, too. Always clockwise.