Head in the Sand ... and other unpopular positions (10 page)

As I mull over these gross
writing
faux pas
—with an odd mixture of revulsion and envy—I’m led to believe
that my own novels don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of
publication. And, my daydreams of one day being a successful
television script writer are forever dashed, because there’s no way
I could come up with plot garbage that’s simultaneously that
ridiculous and sublime. I’d have to drink myself into a stupor or
eat a few dozen Krispy Kremes and send myself into a diabetic coma
in order to maintain the heightened sense of awareness necessary to
write episodes to rival what I’ve seen on these shows over the
years.

But, at least I’ve got something to shoot for as a
writer. It’s good to have goals.

It’s a story I’ve told my
kids a hundred times. “Tell us about the skating rink when you were
a kid, Mom!” They’re all grown now, but they still love hearing
about that skating rink. What makes the story so much fun is that
you just can’t make up stuff like this. I swear it’s all true, but
I’m not sure the kids believe me in their politically correct,
lawsuit-happy world.

In the 1970s, everyone in my elementary
school had a skating party at the local skating rink—often around
our tenth birthdays, which is when I had mine. We all took the
rink’s many quirks in stride, not knowing any better and not having
the perspective of age or wisdom. Especially wisdom. So, none of us
thought anything of asking the front desk clerk and owner, ancient
and tiny Ma Long, for our size skates for each two-hour party
rental, only to be handed a pair of skates that looked like
something Cro-Magnon Man would have used had he invented the wheel
a little sooner. The leather was always worn, the wheels were
misshapen and some funky, faded color we couldn’t identify, and the
laces were frayed and missing the aglets necessary to lace them up
properly. I spent hours at birthday parties sitting in the anteroom
of the skating rink, with skates already on my feet, trying to get
those frayed laces through those dozens and dozens of holes in the
leather. I can see us all now, lined up on the benches, licking our
fingers and trying to use the spit to twist and twirl the lace ends
to get them through those stubborn holes. Thinking about the germs
we must have ingested doing this makes me ill now, in a retroactive
sort of way.

Once our skates were on, we’d get up and
sway and wobble our way to the railing, watching the other kids
already skating around the wooden floor of the oblong rink. Getting
into the flow of traffic was like merging onto the turnpike at rush
hour in a Chevette with a burned-out clutch, but somehow we all
managed to get onto the rink in one piece. I usually ended up doing
a butt-kiss with the floor within the first trip around the rink,
but at least I always had company. If I was lucky, I’d start a
chain-reaction and ten of us would end up sprawled on the floor
together, with everyone forgetting just who started it. It soon
became clear that the inexperienced skaters had to find a way to
cut across traffic and head into the empty center of the rink. But
cutting across traffic was taking your life into your hands.

Two features of this particular rink stand
out in my mind: the music and the bathrooms. The music playing over
the antique speaker system consisted of only four songs: “Paper
Roses” by Marie Osmond, “Build Me Up, Buttercup,” “Soldier Boy,”
and one other song I have mercifully forgotten. This panoply of
musical goodness was piped into our eager ears from four scratchy
45s playing on a tiny record player set up halfway around the far
side of the rink in a small room that also contained a life-sized
plastic reindeer and a chair. Why we never questioned this
arrangement of objects still baffles me.

Ma Long left her post at
the front desk and shuffled onto the rink, around the outside edge
(to avoid getting whacked by overly enthusiastic ten-year-olds),
and over to the record player to put the four 45s
back up onto the spindle after the last one was
done playing. And, at her rate of speed—wearing her wrinkled apron,
three layers of cotton skirts, stockings, leggings, an old
button-down sweater, and a pair of slippers that must have been
family heirlooms by now—well, she barely made it back to the front
desk before she had to turn around and shuffle back to the record
player to pull the four songs back up onto the spindle again. I
think the chair was over there for her to rest and catch her breath
before starting back. I still have no idea what the plastic
reindeer was for.

This wasn’t the oddest
part of the skating rink. The crowning achievement of this rink’s
design was its bathrooms. Someone in his infinite wisdom designed
this rink with the bathrooms accessible only from the skating floor
itself. So, if you were sitting in the anteroom still lacing up
your skates halfway into the party and found you had to relieve
yourself, you still had to skate your way onto the rink (no street
shoes allowed on the rink floor!), into traffic, and whirr about
345
degrees around the rink
counterclockwise before hitting the bathroom door. And, I do mean
“hitting” the bathroom door because, in another brilliant
architectural move, the bathroom doors swung
outward
onto the rink floor. Any
child who had attended more than one party knew not to skate
anywhere near those doors, for fear of getting slammed in the face.
Which, by the way, happened frequently.

Those fortunate enough to
make it to the door without getting a concussion had to grab the
handle with both hands to keep from sailing right past the
bathroom. This usually meant you’d end up hanging onto that door
handle for dear life, with your legs having given out under you,
your butt just inches from the floor. Once you got yourself upright
again, it was no easy feat to get the door open while on wheels.
And, what awaited you once you got the door open was a treat beyond
imagination:
The bathroom floor went
downhill at a twenty-degree angle.

Picture, if you can,
uncoordinated ten-year-olds letting go of that door handle and
careening downhill on skates—improperly laced—toward the far wall
at the bottom.
Smack!
The trick then was to grab the handles of each toilet stall
and pull yourself back uphill to the first available
stall.

You’ve never truly lived until you’ve used a
toilet on roller skates at a twenty-degree sideways incline. You
always ended up leaning into the downward wall of the stall while
trying to be as delicate as possible going about your business.
They should have made it an Olympic sport.

Once you found a way to get straightened
back up and out of the stall, you somehow had to skate across the
downward grade to the sinks. Putting four porcelain sinks in a
downhill bathroom used by young girls on wheels was a stroke of
marketing genius. How this place got insurance is beyond me. You
had to grab one faucet to hang on and wash your hands with the
other without accidentally turning your feet anywhere near the
downward angle of the floor. I don’t know how many lives must have
been lost when girls tried to clutch at the metal faucets or
porcelain sinks on their way back down the incline of the bathroom
floor.

And, of course, once you
were done washing your hands, the worst part of the escapade
awaited you: the long, desperate climb up the floor and back out of
the bathroom. Clutching the faucets of the four sinks carried you
only so far, and then you were left with about five or six feet of
bare uphill floor and no more handles before you made it back to
the door. Some brave souls clung to the wainscoting with their
outstretched palms, but I was too afraid to attempt something so
futile and risky. I always dropped to my hands and knees and
crawled
up to the door,
grabbing the inside door handle and pulling myself up. And I have a
funny feeling those floors didn’t get mopped all that often, so
there went the whole concept of washing your hands.

The last part of the
adventure was trying to open the door without killing someone.
(Remember: The door opened outward onto the rink.) Most of us
opened the door slowly . . .
carefully
. . . sliding out sideways
without opening the door very far and hoping we didn’t get
bombarded by oncoming skaters. Did I mention we were on
wheels?

After an hour of this fun and frivolity, it
was time to have the mid-party birthday cake and soda! All thirty
of us headed for the anteroom and sat on the rickety bench chairs
lining the wall, waiting for Ma Long’s assistant to shuffle past us
in her own deteriorating slippers, asking us each what kind of soda
we wanted. This assistant was rumored to be a woman, although she
had the gravelly voice of a chain-smoker and wore a skirt and pants
at the same time, along with a moth-eaten sweater or two. Or three.
I don’t know why she bothered to ask what flavor we wanted because
we all eagerly yelled, “Chocolate!” There’s nothing less nutritious
and tasty than an old, cheap, generic chocolate soda that hasn’t
been properly refrigerated, but we didn’t care. We never got this
stuff at home.

Once we were stuffed with
birthday cake and chocolate soda that had separated like oil and
water, we headed back out to the rink for the second hour of the
party. We avoided the show-off who could skate backwards and
brought her own skates (with actual laces and those rubber stoppers
in the front). We avoided skating anywhere near the bathroom doors.
We went by the record player and the plastic reindeer and waved,
secretly hoping the thing would wink or move. We veered away from
Ma Long as she shuffled past us to change the records. And, if she
was feeling as frisky as an eighty-year-old again, she might turn
on the disco ball that hung at center rink and shout into the
scratchy microphone, “
Turn around and
skate the other way!”
The combination of
the flashing disco ball and the sudden change in orientation made
us confused and a little nauseous. There’s nothing safer than
thirty queasy schoolkids on roller skates in a dark room with
blinking lights.

Ma Long passed away many
years ago, and I don’t know if the rink is still standing. Perhaps
safety violations have caught up with it over the years as
humorless parents decided you shouldn’t have to climb out of a
bathroom on wheels or risk getting hit with a flying door. But I’m
betting there’s still a case of that chocolate soda in the back
room somewhere. Dust it off and pass me one, would you, for old
time’s sake?

There’s nothing quite like teaching one’s firstborn
the subtleties and complexities of the English language. Nothing
compares to the joy and thrill of first-time parents as they watch
their adorable fledgling rise from the oceans of speechless,
grunting communication and soar to the heights of deep, meaningful
interaction.

And then there’s what happened to us.

Christopher, our firstborn, who had been ahead of his
peers in nearly all stages of his development, except perhaps
learning to operate anything mechanical (a peculiarity that
continues to this day), had started noticing correlations between
words and the delicate interplay of parts of speech. I know he
wouldn’t have put it like that at the time (well, probably not),
but he truly was verbally gifted (or, as his grandmother would say,
“Verbally gifted? Is that what we’re calling it now? In my day we
just called it talkative”). Once, when his younger brother, Jeremy,
was asked why he himself never spoke, he said, “God gave
Christopher a lot to say, and He gave me a lot to do.” Truer words
were never spoken.

So, in these earlier days, we beamed with pride one
night at dinner as lingustic genius Christopher sat in his booster
seat and munched on his potatoes and roast chicken.

“Isn’t it funny how there’s an animal called
‘chicken’ and a food called ‘chicken’ too?”

We nodded approvingly, smiles widening.

“Yes, Christopher. They’re the same thing.”

“What do you mean they’re the same thing?”

Still smiling, pleased that he was learning a
fascinating new language concept, the explanation continued.

“Well, the food chicken that you’re eating came from
the animal chicken on a farm.”

We could almost hear the cogs and wheels turning in
his big-boy brain as this notion slowly worked its way into his
awareness. I mentally counted off the seconds waiting for the
proverbial light bulb to go off over his head. Instead, the
inquisitive look on his face morphed into one of horror. He looked
down at his plate and dropped the fork, letting it clank to the
floor. And then, with a wailing reminiscent of someone cataloguing
the fall of the Hindenburg, he howled with grief.

“Oh no! The poor chickens! All the poor
chickens!”

Stunned into silence, we looked at each other and
then back at Christopher, who was weeping and covering his face in
anguish. We knew he was a sensitive child, but honestly—it was just
a chicken.

“Christopher, it’s okay, really. The chicken—”

But Christopher had already had another change of
facial expression. He was now sniffling and collecting himself,
sitting up straighter, and pushed his plate away from him.

“That’s it!” he declared, with the determined voice
of someone vowing to go forth and sin no more. “I’ll never eat
chicken again!” He crossed his hands over his chest and looked at
us blankly.

My first thought was, “Hey, disaster averted.” My
second thought was, “Now what do I cook? He can’t eat peanut butter
and jelly for dinner.”