Jesus Take The Wheel

Recently my husband and I visited some friends. Said friends have a three-year-old who likes hockey. The three-year-old is also learning to ice skate. At least we were told the three-year-old was learning to skate, and we were invited to go skating together.

Not thinking through anything, I agreed to go skating, and upon entering the skating rink I immediately realized my second mistake. It was eighty-degrees outside, and I was wearing flip flops. Inside the ice skating rink I was greeted by hordes of kids clad in ice skates, bouncing through the entry way while waiting for the zambonis to finish the ice for free skate time.

Visions of some sugar high seven-year-old chopping off my toes with their rental skates flooded my mind. I curled my toes as far toward my foot as they would good and ran to the skate rental window where I grabbed some skates before fording through the sea of foot-weaponed children to an isolated bench.

I had brought socks with me, and I hurriedly clad my feet in my own weapons before reflecting on my first mistake. Agreeing to go skating. I watched the children watch the zamboni, the kids getting louder and more chaotic with each pass of the lumbering machine.

I was about to go onto ice with these energetic freaks? Ice was really hard. And I suddenly felt really, really old. What was I thinking?

When the zamboni rumbled off the ice, a wave of kids piled onto the rink. Our three-year-old friend was one of those kids, and even though they were the smallest kid out there, they glided onto the ice with such grace I immediately knew, I had been sand bagged. That kid was not learning to skate. They knew how to skate. I was learning to skate, and frankly, this was not what I had thought I was signing up for.

But I got on the ice, clinging to the boards and realized, ice is really, really slippery, and it felt even harder and more ominous below my rental skates than it did looking at it from my bench.

Kids whizzed by me. Some flopped haired teenagers in traffic vests with the rink's logo were the worst offenders. Somehow these apparent safety employees were the most reckless of everyone, unable to resist the teen urge to show all the birthday partying eight-year-olds how much better at skating they were. I hugged the wall while kids hurtled at the sound of speed past me.

The three-year-old passed me, their dad, the adult who had tricked me into coming to this hellhole, following with obvious ease. He smiled at me and said, "You're doing great."

This was a lie. But after a few laps, I was able to let go of the boards. I looked back and saw my husband still clutching at the plexiglass. I waited for him to catch up to me.

"I don't think I've skated in thirty-years," I said.

"I've never been ice skating," he told me.

A kid pushing some giant, plastic, walker situation, something designed for people like my husband and I to learn with, rocketed past us at a least a hundred miles an hour.

"We are going to die out here," I said. "This is the most Jesus take the wheel of a situation I've been in in a long time. If I don't trip and break my own wrist, a six-year-old is going to hit me and paralyze me. My mom will be so mad if I knock my teeth out."

My husband was concentrating too hard to respond.

Then something weird happened in that ice rink. Time slowed. Or stretched, or didn't move at all. I think we were in there for years, going in circles, the music loud enough I would later suffer a migraine, the kids ever full of energy, the ice never getting less slick or less hard.

But by the end of it, I was experimenting with hockey stops, transferring my weight from edge to edge, going fast enough to outpace my stopping skills. So even though every moment was a giant opportunity to experience some life altering injury, I leaned into it. I dipped around the kids falling in front of me, dodged the teens on dates holding hands before wrecking, accelerated past the severe-looking woman forcing a long limbed nine-year old to spin in circles.

I might have had ten birthdays in that darkish ice rink. I might have reversed ten birthdays in there.

But somehow we made it out, no one injured, minus the impending migraine.

"That was actually kind of fun," I said, once we were back in the car.

"You got better," my friend said.

"Maybe I should join a beer league hockey team," I said. "Do I need to know how to stop for that, or can I just crash in all those pads?"

My husband looked at me like I was insane, but my friend, the friend who had brought me to that dangerous zoo of ice and foot-based weapons, said, "You should just do it. See what happens."

Jesus take the wheel, hockey beer league edition. What could go wrong?