The first time I ever went to Farraday’s Skating Rink was in the third grade. I used to roller skate all the time, in our basement. I had an old pair of white leather skates, that were handed down to me a hundred times over, and didn’t fit my feet. We would run circles around the big old octopus furnace down in that basement, just like it was nothing. There was a low hanging vent in the back, and we had to duck very low to skate under the thing. Every so often, someone would get a real head-ringer.
But when I showed up at Farraday’s for Alice McFeeny’s* eighth birthday party, I had never stepped into a pair of ice skates before. When I laced up, it showed. My butt was on the ice more than anything for the entire afternoon. One of the kids in our class, Chris Eversley, was some kind of evil wizard on ice skates. He could do that hockey player thing, where he’d skate really fast, directly at you, and then stop on a dime, at your feet, with a huge spray of ice. I fell over every time he did this to me. I begged him to stop. He was a nice enough kid in class, but on the ice, he lost all semblance of being human.
Which led me to my next first. I spent a lot of time sitting on the benches in the concession area that day. It didn’t hurt quite as much as falling on the ice. And there on the counter, was a “Guess the number of jelly beans in the jar” contest. It cost fifty cents to enter. So I blew all the money that my Mom gave me for a snack, and entered the contest. As it turns out, I must have been a poor judge of jelly beans, because I didn’t win the bear. Yes, the prize was a large, pink colored teddy bear, half the size of me, with a rather creepy face. Its smile had teeth, and it struck me then that it was rather odd for a teddy bear to have teeth. It made no matter. When Dad picked us up in the station wagon, I remembered thinking that contests were not so easy. In this case, I was mostly glad I didn’t win the bear, as I would have had to explain the appearance of that bear to my parents. And that would have lead to my poor decision concerning the feigned purchase of my snack. And since I didn’t even like Alice McFeeny, the whole day seemed like an all out bust.
Thankfully, when I got home, I explained to my Mom that all that skating must have made me hungry, and I was afforded a bologna sandwich, with two whole slices, and Fritos.
And that, my friends, was foreshadowing. Even though I didn’t see it then in my short sightedness, it would happen many times in my life. There would be events, or happenings, which would not turn out in the most favorable of conditions. Now, as with then, we think: What the heck is going on Universe? Why in the world did that fall apart like that? (Whatever “that” may be. The fender bender, the crack in the heirloom vase, the burnt pot roast, the pipe bursting in the crawl space.) But what we don’t see in the mess of things, is that there was a scary bear that we really didn’t need, which had the potential for giving us lifelong nightmares. Or, perhaps. We didn’t notice the delightful bologna sandwich, with lots of mayo, at the end of the ordeal.
Somehow, the lessons are there. We just might not be immediately privy.
We take it all in stride. It all comes around. If we lose our butts in the jellybean contest, or bust our butts repeatedly on the ice, we can be fairly certain that a good bologna sandwich may be waiting around the corner. Yes. The lessons we learn might even be the kind with the crusts trimmed off, and Fritos on the side. And that’s what I learned from ice skating.
(*Names were changed to protect the innocent bystanders of my youthful perceptions.)
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“Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
― Mary Oliver
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“I have learned all kinds of things from my many mistakes. The one thing I never learn is to stop making them.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings
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“That’s the thing about lessons, you always learn them when you don’t expect them or want them.”
― Cecelia Ahern, If You Could See Me Now
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