Given my squeamishness about the possibility of losing life or limb, you’d think I’d be really careful about the risks that I put my own body through. Unfortunately, this is not the case. In the last 10 years I have acquired a gouge under my left knee from falling off a bike and a hole in my right leg from being yanked off the same bike by a Labrador Retriever. This doesn’t include the various injuries that sent me to the emergency room from cooking-related injuries. (It took me a while to make “Knives are sharp - proceed with caution” an automatic script in my mind.) Still, most of these injuries were sort of freak accidents that could have happened to anyone. My latest injury doesn’t fit is this category. My latest injury was based on a dangerous combination of denial and poor judgment.
I tore some ligaments in my knee while roller-skating. In my defense (or perhaps a way to rationalize my denial), I’m teaching drama to children at a camp this summer and was skating with my students. And, there was a time in my life when I went roller-skating every weekend. I was really good at it. Unfortunately, it’s been over 20 years since I had laced on a pair roller skates.
Bolstered by my denial, I skated onto the rink. After trying to teach some of the less confident skaters how to skate away from the wall, I gave up and joined the throngs of children skating around the rink. After a few spins around the rink, my confidence soared and my old daredevil voice came back to life. “Why skate around and around in a circle slowly when you can go really fast?” it whispered. When I ignored the question, it upped its campaign, singing, “Ain’t no point in goin’ nowhere slowly. Might as well be goin’ nowhere fast” (from the soundtrack to 1980’s film, “Streets of Fire”). Even as I watched children mopping the floor with their clothes around me, the voice of reason started losing its grip on me and the daredevil voice started making sense. Finally, the daredevil voice whispered, “Skating around in a circle with a bunch of kids to bad music is really boring. It would be a lot more fun if you were going really fast.” The next thing I knew, the voice of reason was gone and I was racing around the rink. I was whizzing by all the children, even those wearing roller blades. Just as I was feeling pretty cocky and self-satisfied about how much faster I was going than all the rest of the skaters, someone wiped out in front of me. Annoyed by the distraction, I dodged the fallen skater and in the process went down myself.
Go To Page: 1 2
