Roller Skating  

What's the trick? I could never figure it out. Some of my most memorable, embarrassing stories relate to skating, gravity, and physical discomfort.

Christmas Eve, around the age of seven, was when I was first introduced to rollerblades. They looked like extraterrestrial machine guns when my sister took them out of the box. My sister was ecstatic. She had been wishing for those clunky things for a long time. On Christmas Day, she gleefully opened up all of her presents, but I don't think Santa's gifts were of much interest to her, because as soon as everyone was finished unwrapping, she begged to go outside and try out the skates our grandmother had gifted her the night before. She strapped on her helmet, fastened her padding, and buckled on her rollerblades. Actually, these particular ones were called rollerball skates, skates with two balls that looked as if they escaped from a pool table. These differed from the safer, more commonly used, four-wheel inline skates.

My twin sister was a very talented gymnast at the time. Man, did she have balance. As soon as she buckled her skates on, she was rolling gracefully down the driveway like it was the easiest thing in the world. It definitely wasn't rocket science to her, well, that expression is practically useless here, because she if she ever tried hard enough, she could easily make rocket science seem as difficult as velcroing one's shoe. I envied her so much that day. After a while of rollerballing up and down the street, she noticed me sitting on the driveway and asked me if I wanted to try. I laughed and told her no way. She shrugged and kept on skating.

A couple years later, let's say at the age of nine, my sister grew bored of skating because she had no one else to skate with. She decided to enroll our younger brother in (what I like to call) Rollerballing 101, a class with some pretty unorthodox teaching methods. The class was taught by her and the teaching method was to push my terrified brother down our driveway squealing in fear as the speed on the skates would pick up, which forced him to quickly dive into the grass before he severely injured himself on the steep, bottom half of the driveway. My brother dropped out of Rollerballing 101 immediately after that incident. Now, I must be a complete fool, because somehow my sister managed to talk me into rollerballing soon after my brother quit and ran crying into our house. Gosh, she could be a good lawyer or a very successful real estate agent, but instead she's studying to be a doctor. Beats me...

After almost witnessing my brother's death, I decide to put the skates on at the bottom of our driveway, so I could rollerball on the street where the pavement was pretty uniform. I also velcroed every kind of padding imaginable to myself. I looked like a mutant armadillo skating, or should I say, awkwardly inching and staggering down the street. My sister told me to put one skate in front of the other, but whenever I did so, I'd wobble and lose my balance as if I were standing on a floating log. After falling many times, I decided to inch down the street slowly without moving my feet. Every time my skates would stop, I'd thrust my hips forward as hard as I could, which would give me about three more seconds of roll time. My sister laughed at this. "Look! You're almost to the neighbor's mailbox," she'd tease.

I was getting pretty confident with my crazy, rollerballing skillz, until one of our neighbors pulled up to us in her car. Sure enough, her daughter, Becky, was in the back seat. She rolled down the car window and asked what we were doing. I wanted to say, "Like, skating, duuuh," but something stopped me, perhaps the humiliation of looking like one of those dorky kids in a "safety first" commercial. Becky didn't like me very much, at least, I felt like I was a huge joke to her since she and my sister constantly teased me. As Becky and my sister talked for a bit, I stared at the ground like she wasn't there. I was so embarrassed and I hoped that word of my appearance and lack of skating skills would not make its way to the school ground. After Becky and her mother drove away, I immediately took off my skates and walked home.

After a few years without encountering anything with balls or small fixed wheels, I got an invitation on the school bus to my best friend's 12th birthday party. The party was to be held at a roller rink. I originally didn't plan on skating there, but when every kid at the party had brought inline skates and was enjoying themselves out on the rink, my skating-impaired friend Natalie and I decided to rent some beginner skates and join the fun. Fun was not so much the word. As soon as Natalie and I entered the rink, we were constantly holding on to one another and trying not to stumble over ourselves. Little five year old kids were skating circles around us. It was pathetic. All the sudden, the lights go dim and disco lights flash about. A disc jockey shouts from above and everyone on the rink cheers. Unexpectedly, the disc jockey shouts, "3, 2, 1, GO!" The music changed to a rapid beat. My heart started racing. I didn't know what was happening. Everyone was skating around like a flock of frantic gazelle and I found myself in the middle of some game that I had never even heard of. It seemed like everyone was crowding to the corners of the rink. I shouted at Natalie to roll to a corner. Slowly we inched toward the same corner. We were almost there. Allllmost there! Sooooooo close... The music suddenly stops. Natalie and I are the only two people still out in the rink. Kids begin to laugh as we stumble to a wall. We're "out" apparently, and literally. What a relief...

The last time I ever wore skates was in 2007, my junior year of high school. On the last day of gym class, our teacher made us rollerblade as an end of the school year treat. A treat? Was she kidding me? Everyone in the class had to participate and borrow used roller skates from a large barrel in the equipment room. The barrel should've been marked, "1987 time capsule," because that's how old I believe those skates were. I spent a good half hour looking for skates to fit my feet, plus I was purposefully and guilefully delaying my wonderful skating experience. When I finally put my skates on, I stood up and stumbled backward on my butt. My gym teacher stared at me with shock but never uttered a word. How embarrassing. It was somewhat déjà vu all over again. Everyone in my class could skate well, except me of course. I'd put one foot in front of the other and appear to be running on a floating log again. I'd fall on my knees, butt, or hands every ten feet or so. Someone in my class noticed that I was having a difficult time and skated over to help me. She grabbed on to me and told me to tilt my skates inward as I put them one in front of the other. It began to work! I was skating, sort of, for the first time in my life! After about five minutes of actually enjoying myself, our gym teacher yells to "wrap it up" and put our skates away. I was surprised that I was disappointed for the utterance of those words. I hated gym class - and skating. At least, I think...

Well, it's now been about two years since I've touched or have even looked at a roller skate.

And I'm perfectly okay with that.




H'm...Now, snowboarding...
What's the trick to that? Should I expect much?
My sister wants me to go with her sometime soon...








Do you like to roller skate? Do you make it look as easy as velcroing a shoe or as difficult as rocket science? How long did it take you to learn how to skate and at what age did you learn? Tell me some of your awesome or embarrassing rollerblading/skating stories. Thanks for listening. :)