But it did get me thinking how we ever decided it was fun. Not everybody can skate. For those who can’t, skating can look like a terrible time. Direction becomes a challenge. Stopping is dependent on a stroke of luck. Gravity is suddenly a mortal threat. It’s a dark and foreboding place to find yourself in, all in the name of... fun?
But, some of us choose to learn how to skate anyway. In fact, as I have learned over time, most people seem to have stared in the eye of such menacing danger as mere children. This includes myself. I pondered this revelation recently, and determined that learning to skate is a mission actually best suited to children, and it’s for two reasons:
Babies seem so fragile, but after a few years, they become remarkably hard to kill. They carry their crying and whining and other displays of defenselessness into these years, but it is merely engrained behavior. A child under attack does not cry out of physical pain, but out of frustration, confusion, or sensing a critical loss of control. In other words, kids don’t cry “OW!”, they cry “WHAT THE F&%^!?”
There is perhaps no greater story I can tell to attest to the invincibility of kids than the time we got a strobe light when I was barely a teenager. It didn’t take us long to figure out that it worked best in the basement at night, where there wasn't a single other light source to interfere.
My nephew Dustin (two months younger than myself) came over some weekend to play with it, and I invited my neighbor friend Denise and her little brother Dennis (with the Mr. T haircut) over to join. Dustin, being the most adventurous of all of us, decided the maximum amount of fun we could have with this thing was dialing the strobe frequency to the lowest setting possible before “off” and running around the cramped concrete basement with three rock-solid support poles at full speed.
I decided to hide inside the hockey net and watch.
I grabbed a hockey stick to flick the upstairs light switch on. As we found Dennis lying dazed on the cement floor, we realized the startlingly loud and out-of-place gong sound came from a support pole being smashed by his face. Denise and Dustin moved in to check on him.
With that, Denise carried her little brother home in her armpit. No crying. Not even a whimper. The next day, the goose egg on his forehead was the only evidence left of the incident.
Kids take a lot of things seriously that adults make fun of them for. But a closer look at the reasoning behind it makes sense. A child may or may not find the act of skating to be interesting. But if the child has friends who skate, there is suddenly much more pressure behind learning to skate as well.
Nobody wants to be the kid at the pool party who can’t swim, or the kid at the makeout party who doesn’t know the first thing about kissing, or the kid who doesn’t know how to ride bikes with his or her friends. These things become more than goofy playground skills. They become rites of passage.
Recently at the Rollodrome, I observed a father trying to teach his daughter to skate.
After swinging her around a few more times, he decided to let her go in the middle at her own pace, which is exactly what she wanted.
A child knows the difference between riding a bike with mom or dad’s hand stopping it from falling over and actually riding a bike. For this child, learning to skate with dad pulling her was not good enough. It wasn’t about father/daughter time anymore. It was about taking a step toward growing up.
She was on a mission. Danger and fear be screwed, she was not leaving that floor until she figured out how to roll those clunky plastic Fisher-Price wheels under her own power...
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