by Clifford Kurt

Created on: July 05, 2009

The Great Ice-Capade

The ice rink next to my office building loomed as a mecca - a chance to reconnect with a childhood of long, leisurely ice skating sessions, holding hands with Ann or Mary or Karen or the other Karen.

So in a misguided attempt at recapturing a piece of my lost innocence, I summoned the necessary courage and walked over to the rink. I paid $10, got a pair of 11 Wide skates, and laced 'em up. I sighed. Thinking of how it had been probably 20 years and 50 pounds since I last ice skated, I figured it had to be like riding a bike, right?

Walking to the ice pad was pretty easy. Oh, a bit wobbly to be sure, but that could have been my nerves manifesting their anger by knocking my knees around.

I stood at the entrance to the ice pad and waited for a safe moment to debutante. I saw my opening, and gingerly placed one timid foot on the ice. The moment of truth was now. I lifted my other foot off the relative safety of the mat and placed it, too, upon the ice.

I shuffled a bit as I moved along down the ice rink, holding onto the wall as I went. Like riding a bike? Hah! Not hardly! I felt like a Republican at a Pfish concert - frightened, unsure and conspicuously out of place. But like all good Republicans, I was determined to make this work. So, ever forward.

As I shuffled along the ice, propelling myself more with my hands along the wall than with my skates, I noticed my feet starting to hurt. Horrible, shooting pain along the soles of both feet. The obvious cause of this was my near-orbit-inducing weight load centered ultimately on two 1/4 wide pieces of steel. But I didn't want to concede this. I went full blown into denial and decided there must be something wrong with the skates.

I continued on. By the time I got halfway around the rink, my feet were in such pain that I had to sit and rest. In my mind, I heard a referee's whistle and then his shout: "200 pizzas, 11 dozen chocolate chip cookies, 9 gallons of ice cream in the past twenty years - you are banished to three minutes in the penalty box!"

And into the penalty box I went, where I sat and rested my aching, breaking feet. After a sufficiently humbling while, I stood back up and shuffled my way around the rest of the rink. And out the gate to sit again.

But no! I wasn't going to give up after just one pathetic, mousy shuffle around the rink!

So I stood up, and this second time, I made it all the way around the rink. Victory was mine! I held on to the wall

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