If any of you have a great desire to inflict serious ankle injuries upon yourselves, I would strongly recommend you take up ice skating. As you might have guessed, I recently went ice skating with some of my friends. Here’s how it came about.
Shelly called Aaron’s house one morning while I was there, saying she wanted to go ice skating that night, but Aaron couldn’t because he was already going out with Vicki, so we called Rachel, who, having just recovered from heart surgery performed by Bob, who is actually her father, agreed to go, even though Kayla and Louis were still in Barbados looking for Martin and Cricket’s baby, which was lost in the airport where Steven’s luggage was stolen by the religious cult headed by Justin, who of course is Anthony’s ex-lover (but don’t tell Catherine). Eventually, Aaron and Vicki changed their plans and, being careful to avoid Nicholas and Michael, who are still involved with the Mafia and want the entire Heyden family rubbed out because of what Jason and Jennifer did to Jack and Julie last June in Jacksonville, went ice skating with Shelly, Rachel, and me.
We went to Ontario Ice Skating, which, surprisingly enough, is located in Ontario. Of the five of us, only Shelly ice skated well (her specialty was the famous “figure one”). Aaron was a rather violent skater, but he had skated once before, which he was quick to point out.
ME: I saw you fall on your back and accidentally kick that kid in the neck with the sharp part of your skate over there.
AARON: Hey! I’ve only been skating once.
The rest of us had never skated before, but once we were on the ice, we soon realized, much to our surprise, that it was almost exactly like roller skating, except that:
We eventually got the hang of it, though (that is, our ankles went numb), and we started having fun. Naturally, however, there had to be a problem. The problem came about in the form of a young boy who was skating around like a maniac and wearing a Kings hat.
(That’s the problem with skating rinks. Everyone wears hockey team paraphernalia, so you can’t tell if they’re hockey fans or gang members.)This kid was obviously born wearing ice skates, which must have been very painful for his mother. (“Congratulations, Mrs. Johnson! It’s a bouncing baby Oiler!”) He irritated a few of us by cutting us off and causing us to run into various fixed objects such as walls and floors and enormously fat men on ice skates who apparently have extremely low centers of gravity or else they would have fallen down a long time ago. We decided the obvious thing for us to do would be to chase this boy and try to steal his Kings hat.
We spent the better part of an hour chasing Hat Boy, as he came to be called, before we finally managed to get our hands on the hat. It was all in fun, of course, and we gave it back promptly, as soon as the legal authorities suggested we do so.
And by the time you read this, I may have the feeling back in my ankles.
This is one of the few columns whose title given here is the same one I originally gave it. I didn't try very hard in those days, and usually just slapped a title together at the last minute; in this case, today I still like the one I gave it then.
