The Fabric

I was at Ignite Bend this week. Brad Ward was one of the speak­ers. He took us on a 5 minute tour of the music we grew up with. He is about my age so his music was my music. When he got to Elton John, I was taken instantly to the skat­ing rink on Padre Island Drive in Cor­pus Christi, circa 1976. I heard the words, ”Cou­ples Skate!” echo in me as Philadel­phia Free­dom rat­tled through the cor­ru­gated metal rink. The blood rose in me, flushed me, because I could not skate well enough to hold a girl’s hand and skate. Actu­ally I would have appre­ci­ated a hand to hold…for the bal­ance. I had trou­ble start­ing out from a stop (imag­ine a giraffe star­tled while drink­ing water) and even more trou­ble once I got going. I was one of the unfor­tu­nate ones at the skat­ing rink who ended up stop­ping by unabashedly slam­ming in to the three-runged red steel pipe guard rail that sur­rounded the rink. You would find me dou­bled over the top rung as my momen­tum tried to throw me in to the snack bar. I had to stop this way because if I ever used the crazy brake on the toe of the skate my fore­head would hit the cement imme­di­ately. Poten­tially sac­ri­fic­ing my spleen felt safer than the head injury. Sim­ple math.

Besides my lack of skillz I was pet­ri­fied (lit­er­ally, and in more ways than one) to ask a girl much of any­thing. I think the testos­terone riot going on in me def­i­nitely went to my head. It changed my bal­ance. There were so many girls and all of them per­fect, all hav­ing fun!, and all had some­how learned to skate expertly. When did all these peo­ple learn to skate? Did my par­ents deprive me of manda­tory skat­ing instruc­tion in ele­men­tary school? I sus­pected that it was a pub­lic school class. I didn’t learn it since I went to Trin­ity Lutheran. How could those Luther­ans legally shut us out from skat­ing? I really did think this – still not sure I wasn’t right.

Then, of course, the guys who could skate. Bas­tards! Back­wards and gaz­ing at their chicks, hold­ing hands in that grace­ful way where you hold both hands across the front of each other’s body ready to do a spin at any moment. Their own skates. Ugh. I did not have my own skates and I was grow­ing about three inches a month so my pants would be a lit­tle short with shoes on. With skates on they were the orig­i­nal koolats. I would end up tak­ing the skates off sulk­ing off to the arcade with the other Non­skaters, blow­ing my allowance on Aster­oids, and hop­ing I would some­day find a way to talk to a girl.

And Elton John, voice as smooth as silk, weav­ing itself as the thread in the fab­ric of my mem­ory, a fab­ric which I can feel in me now, as famil­iar as the blue plaid blan­ket I wrapped up in for safety for the first twelve years of my life.

Paint­ing by Les Lyden