Hell on Wheels

I want to be a roller girl.

I learned to roller skate when I was 5 years old.  In a strange and awesome juxtaposition, my church based kindergarten in rural Carriere, MS had a skating rink.  What is even more ironic, it wasn't the only skating rink in the town of 1500 people, max.  On rainy days, instead of going outside for recess, we would file single file into the skating rink and cut loose.  On the weekends, my mother accompanied me to the "real" rink in town where I received a series of skating lessons.  I took to it like a fish in water.  Skating was my 'gig'.  When I wasn't skating in a rink, I was perfecting my backwards skating skills in the hallway of our home.  I had my own skates (the sign of a true roller skater) as well as insta-skates, which transformed my tennis shoes into clanky skates.  For my 8th Christmas, Santa (yes, I still believed at that point) brought me the most superfly phat pair of white boot skates I had ever seen.  I don't hear "Xanadu" by Olivia Newton John, or "Lady" by Kenny Rogers (couple skate) that I don't feel a twinge to cross my right foot over my left.  By the time I was a teenager, I could couple skate (backwards).  To this day, I can proudly say that I never suffered a fall or flattened someone else's fingers in my adventures.  Sadly, skating rinks began disappearing in the late 1980s and I took a hiatus from my love of gliding along to funky music.  Not coincidentally, the artist Cameo also saw a drop in record sales.  In the mid 90s, my best friend from college bought me a pair of rollerblades for my birthday.  Rollerblades were okay, but TOO MUCH WORK.  This was actual exercise...not fun.  And, honestly, I didn't want to identify with the granola chics, whizzing about the campus on their blades with their extremely muscular calves.  I gave another half-hearted effort to the roller blade movement in the early part of the last decade, taking in the Mississippi River views as I tried to assimilate into the Harbor Town crowd.  Didn't last long.  Try rollerblading for 1.5 miles, against the blustery wind on a chilly March day...you'll never put on another pair.  Or at least, I didn't.  I just began to regain feeling in my shins...3 months ago.  Plus, I hated the gear.  I now use my knee pads to do floor scrubbing work. 

I would love nothing more than to lace up (lace...not latch) a pair of roller skates and glide around a rink.  Unfortunately, in Memphis, doing so means taking my life in my own hands and risk greater injury getting from my car to the door.  Last night, I saw a preview for "Whip It", a coming of age roller derby movie.  Now, I am old enough to be Ellen Page's mother (if I had been a YOUNG teen mother), but I couldn't help the excitement at the prospect of putting on massive amounts of make up and a pair of skate...basically, 1987 all over again.  Except with shoving, potential injury, and a moniker.  I quickly talked myself out of this prospect after being shoved by a big dose of reality.  I was sitting at home on a Saturday night in a nightgown with a redbox movie and a Sprite.  I'm no roller girl.  Sure, I have enough pent up aggression to open an institutional sized can of whoop ass, but I'm old.  I am old and tired.  I am old and tired and healthy.  And I would like to keep it that way.  I sure got a kick out of envisioning myself caked up with Max Factor and bandaids, being all aggressive and mean.  I laughed out loud when I thought about the moniker my far younger teammates would give me: Grandma Murder.  Or maybe Katherine Hipburn.  Or Ma Bell Hell.  Or Olden Girl.  Auntie Mame.  Either way, I awoke this morning feeling rejected by something I had rejected myself.

So, after I did my elderly routine of reading the paper with my coffee and watching CBS Sunday Morning, I entered phase two of my lazy Sunday morning routine...I opened my laptop.  I couldn't control my fingers from typing in "Memphis Roller Derby" into the google search field.  I was led to this.  There, I found, with quickening pulse, that there seemed to be no age cutoff.  But I found something else, far more restrictive and yet such a common theme in my life.  It wasn't that I was too old to do it, it was that I had once again chosen a course that would divert me from fun and exciting to safe and predictable.  DAMN, grad school.  Taking up my time for things I might actually enjoy.  I didn't miss the irony in the fact that there was a time that grad school represented fun and exciting, something that I always put on the back burner while I pursue my safe and predictable activities of working and getting married.  And now, that very thing has become the albatross.

Not that educating myself actually prevents me from getting down and dirty; but there are time constraints.  Due to my hatred of poverty, I must work and go to school at night.  Most night classes occur on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  I can see myself signing up to kick some ass, only to meekly tell my team captain (Betty Gravel or Kim Reaper) that I must be excused from practice on these nights because I have class or study group.  They would probably stub cigarettes out in my palms for this infraction.  I say this only based on perception, because I assume that these ladies are hard core.  Like the normal chickens pecking the lame one to death, I would be seen as semi committed and subject to scorn.  Another irony, I am choosing the path that leads to me helping bring comfort to people over the path that would help me bring pain; even though both are equally appealing! 

I think about another time that I had to choose a path.  By the time I was a junior in college, I was fed up with formal education and wanted so badly to drop out and pursue beauty school (I just dated myself...by referring to it as beauty school).  My parents were aghast at this notion, and since they were my benefactors, I felt obligated to finish up the degree.  There are more times than not that I am glad I did.  But, sometimes, I think about what my life would be like if I had chosen the other road.  Joining the roller derby league isn't a career choice, and I am likely overthinking this, but I know myself well enough to know that it has to be one or the other.  Devote my evenings to grad school, or devote my evenings to recreation.  I spent my adult life so far devoting my time to the safe options, so as to build a future that wasn't so constrained.  And here I am.

I saved the website to my favorites folder.  A way of putting it on the back burner for now.  I will be 38 years old at the end of my grad education.  Perhaps if I start taking Boniva and add a couple of glasses of milk to my day, I can build strong enough bones to start then.  Maybe by then, a Senior league will start up.  Oldies but Baddies.  Declining Women.  Bitches on Wheels.  Watch for me!  I'll be the one popping Aleve and grinning.