Monday Musing

Who moved this floor?!

The ground is much lower-down tonight than it was when I was eight, or even earlier this evening before adding six-inches of height by putting on rental-roller-skates. I take short, clompy, tentative steps out onto the funky old-school roller rink’s painted wood floor. Wow! It’s a long way down. Am I crazy to be doing this at my current age?

Please, let me stay UP!

Whoosh! People are whizzing by. Stay close to the wall this first time around, Maxwell. Get used to the feel. Let your body relax and remember. You used to do this for hours on end, time out of mind… with metal wheeled skates secured ‘round your flappy-soled shoes while your skate key bumped against your boney chest and you swept the Eucalyptus pods off the red cement patio. No brakes in those days, except for walls and dragging one skate sideways. And those Eucalyptus pods could make you stop. On a dime! Or a pod, if your wheel hit one! Instant stop usually meant a fall. I got good at gliding around those nasty suckers. Just as I’m learning to skate around the rough bits on the worn wooden boards of this circa 1950s floor.

Remember, body. Remember!

Remember the Joy!

Ignore the memory of Daddy saying, “You have to wear a pillow tied to your butt.” It came from his fear and was meant to be loving, but it was humiliating with friends there! Ignore the memory of skinned knees. (Actually, remember that those knee hurts happened less with skating, and more with sliding into home from Angelika and Peter’s house across the gravel car-park area at the top of your dead-end-hill in Echo Park. At sunset, Mom would hold you on her lap to apply mercurochrome the same color as the sky.)

Remember how wonderful it felt to spin around on the skates holding onto the redwood siding of the dining-room-corner of the house at the end of the patio and skate backwards along the cement pathway to the end, then forward again to spin around that same corner and skate clockwise all around the perimeter of the patio.

Pause. Smile. Repeat.

Hours of fun imbedded in cellular memory. Sixty years later, it’s still a thrill. I can’t stop smiling. My Somatic Experiencing friends and I sail around and around more and more confidently with each lap - giving each other thumbs up and air fives. (An actual high five at this point would probably end badly.) All night, folks on the sidelines give us thumbs up. All generations helping one another. Little kiddles being helped by teens and parents. I befriend a rainbow-clad lass of ten. She likes my green scarf. She wants to learn to go backwards. We play at it a while. She sorta gets it! The rental attendant, when I turn in my skates to her at the end of the evening says, “Girl! I was watching you. You did GREAT!.”

“Thanks. It comes back, doesn’t it.” I say.

“I love skating!”

Maybe it’s the white hair - breaking the stereotype that old people aren't supposed to be able to do this. I feel nearly 20, not nearly 70. Except for one butt bruise (where's that pillow when I need it?) I am intact and happy.

In the heat of July, my husband and I took our recently-turned-seven-year-old granddaughter to an ice rink. She and I were whizzing ‘round by the end of our rental hour. SUCH a delight to share that time with her and witness, from this outside perspective of my advanced years, the period of HUGE BRAIN-GROWTH SPURT of which Piaget, the child development specialist, spoke. During the seventh year, along with permanent teeth, so many new skills emerge. She has mastered cursive writing and jumping rope. She is working on bicycle balancing, does well on the ice, and can play a few tunes on the piano. These skills are flourishing exponentially. In addition, she's recently read two books in the Harry Potter series - the second one, three times - and many other advanced-for-second-graders books and series of books. She’s quite fond of Calvin and Hobbs, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe series.

She wows and warms my heart.

I looked all over the house for my shoe skates Saturday. I purchased them in the 1980s, when my friend Emily and I found a wonderful rink where we could take our kids. Her kids were about the same age as mine. Fun times. I thought sure I knew just where I put them when we moved here to our new home in Oakland. Too many rooms. Too many closets. Can’t find them anywhere. Perhaps I gave them away when we had our back to back “house coolings” on leaving the old house. I know I gave away the Razor Scooter. The skates, I thought I kept. Don’t remember.

What a treat that my body remembers the yummy feel of the glide, the fondness for fast wind in my hair, and the exhilaration of re-mastering the old turns and backward skating.

Thumbs up to all my SE peeps and the other lovely folks at Redwood Roller Rink’s Disco Night in Redwood City, California.

* * * * * * * * *

How is it that I have a daughter who just turned forty? I feel younger than I remember my mom acting when I was forty! I wonder how she felt. Of more import is the worldly wisdom both our daughters embody at forty and at thirty-six. We were celebrating the older daughter’s birthday Saturday night, just before I went skating. I wanted the younguns to enjoy their night of gaming without looking over their shoulder, so stayed only an hour. What a beautiful, F U N, and delicious evening they created! When I left, they were playing walk-around Mad Libs, “Cards Against Humanity”, at one table, and Poker at another. I heard later they also played “Heads Up” which is an App for iPhones and tablets. Much later, they played Charades… no app necessary.

Younger daughter and her husband drove up from the Central Coast to help out and

P A R T Y H A R D Y & H E A R T Y.

Seeing Mo surrounded by love and admiring friends warmed my heart.