# Rollerblading Spinout



## RomanticEditor (Sep 28, 2009)

*Hockey played center stage in my childhood and teenage years. I lived and breathed it like freezing air. Hockey circulated in my blood veins so rapidly, I only felt slight tinges of cold in my extremities… ears, nose and toes -- and the TOES not so much until I got home and I actually began to thaw, then the pain intensified acutely enough to make me wonder if maybe six to seven hours out in a frozen park may have been a little bit too much?! Hmmmm?*


_The time came when the arena switched from abstract ice to concrete Roller skating. Raymond Leroux, my best friend and greatest initiator of all the ages, invited me to try it out. I was flagrantly out of my comfort zone to try weird and wonderful new stuff, but for Raymond I would accept new risks any time. Why would I do that?_

_At first, Roller skating seemed too frightening and out of control. Something about a whole arena of people on wheels in close proximity to each other just didn’t feel safe. Ahem. Let’s just say I was longing for the cold icy surfaces of yesterday. I knew the insecurity was more in my head than my legs for really the difference wasn’t that great. Anyhoo, I finally got comfortable enough to actually enjoy it. Now that for me was dangerous._

_By the way, what I just wrote so far was just a preamble to the real anecdote I desperately want to share, partly because it gets lots of laughs when I tell it and secondly, I have never attempted to describe this event on paper._

_Several years ago, I accompanied some young people to a Roller skating place in a small but popular arena called Music. That is quite an amusing name, because the annoying noise they play is anything but “music”, but then whose complaining, right? As one teenage T-Shirt read, “If this is too loud, then you’re too old.” Anyway, the thought of getting back on skates was enough by itself to transport me to happier, more carefree days, so I was looking forward to this momentous occasion in spite of the annoying “music”… and I’m not that old, okay?_

_Also, it didn’t bother me that I hadn’t been on skates for years. I knew I’d get my bearings in a hurry and would propel myself again through the air like Flash Gordon or some contemporary equivalent. All my ice skating skills naturally transferred without much strain. The only exception was that I never learned to stop on Roller blades, nor did I have the slightest interest to learn. It just didn’t appeal to me. I figured I could succeed quite well without it, thank you. And please, don’t tell me I should have. I never liked the word “should”! _

_You need to know something about my skating for this story to make any sense. You see, in Canada boys are conceived with their skates already on (as painful as that may be to their poor mothers) and therefore always pushing the sport to its limits, so the idea of skating in a run-of-the-mill way was inconceivably too boring. To make skating fun I converted it into an Olympic obstacle course. In other words, I got a kick from weaving in and out of the most precarious situations and the more crowded the arena, well the better._

_Flashback… returning to the high school skating trip; Rollerblading invariably has a matchless effect upon me. I’m instantly transformed into a sixteen year old juvenile and forget my real stage of life and on this occasion I enjoyed reliving the high-flying antics of yesterday until I got flagged down by an abrupt reality check. Ouch!!!! Someone, somehow grossly misjudged his/her calculations hitting another skater and spun frantically out of control. Yes, it was me! Instinctively my body knew I was going down hard and it would be my head that would strike first. Like a sorrowful drowning victim I clasped whatever I could to save myself from parting my head in two. I don’t know how I did it, but I was able to latch onto a strap in mid air. The next part of the story gets a bit embarrassing so, let’s just skip it ….if you don’t mind. _

_There’s no way you are going to get me to tell you what kind of strap it was. You think I’m going to ruin my reputation telling you it was a bra strap? No way. It was just a miracle cord stretched out from Heaven to save me. Yeah, that’s the real story and I’m not spiritualizing. That’s all you or anyone else needs to know. Neither will I mention how ridiculous I looked dangling in the air like a trapeze artist holding on for dear life to the front part of the bra strap (not the girl BTW) while the young woman who became my safety net stood ungracefully bent over me desperately balancing her body to keep us both from dropping. Hey, it’s not my fault she was blond and busty!_

_Anyway, the whole point of the story is that I’m not good at stopping when it comes to Rollerblading, so maybe this trait also applies to my writing... bye bye!_​


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