Remember when you used to go roller skating as a kid? I’m reading this book called Bridge of Sighs by Russo which made me think of a whole bunch of stuff growing up. Its one of those tender, warm, yet somehow disturbing works that gives you a glimpse into a generation of people and families. I started reading it thinking that I’d just put it down after a few pages. But the characters and their stories and the boy becoming a man grabbed onto me. Now the late evenings and early mornings are filled with the story of Lucy and Noonan and the families and the connections.
Perhaps reading at its best is meant to make you wander a path. I’ve seen movies recently like Into the Wild which have done that and now this book makes me remember a dim past event. Way back when, I used to go rollerskating every Friday and Saturday night. In the stone-age past of my youth, it was a place that was almost acceptable by the adults; but us kids knew that young women went there. When the lights dimmed and the wheel of light came on, everyone would skate and touch and feel and feel the shattered pieces of puberty alight in their lower regions. Pants got wet, people felt liberated, and the worries of the other lives never dawned on us. But the most amazing part was the social distancing I had not remembered until reading the book and Russo’s characterization of life separated by stress, wealth, property, desire. There at the roller rink, there was an invisible line drawn down the middle almost. The line represented the same division of wealth and status but also it separated a social class from another. But as the lights went down, we all mixed. First it was rather slowly and hesitantly. Kids want to meet, get to know, see what other kids feel and do; but to break the barriers that perhaps the adults in their well-meaning yet shattered worlds cast on us is difficult. Perhaps impossible?
Well, not really. The roller rink then was a destiny agent and I remember friendships were struck and renewed. There was the fight every so often as a boundary line crossed over but they were rare events. Most of the time was spent investigating our youth, our urges, our desires. The few adults were too busy trying to police up the rink to watch us all. And we were too inexperienced, tender, wanting more to understand that the human body is a complex thing and that we were just beginning to understand its needs.
This roller rink was also a life station and a place that I remember now with fondness. Most likely its gone as most of the places there from my youth. Those places disappeared to make way for convenience stores, bookshops, and strip malls. Those are the new stations of life; but too often the malls are places not of life unfortunately. Somehow we’ve changed out that innocent skate down a hardly lit wooden floor for guns blazing in malls.
What’s happened to us? Perhaps none of us remember the roller rinks of our youth; what we did and wanted to do there. I want to go back to it, to its place and see if it still exists. But in sadness, I know. It would never be the same. Nothing ever is. You simply cannot ever go back even in movies with Michael J. Fox. The dichotomy and paradox of the space and time continuum is demanding yet patently false as Edward Abbey once noticed about reality. So perhaps one day I’ll wander back to the Antelope Valley as a visitor and look up the place on division street it lived. Yes…
Just like in Sighs. It was division street. It not only divided east and west but it also marked the joining of both.
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