THE NAKED ANIMAL

When I walked into my classroom yesterday morning, the title of this post was written on the whiteboard in my hand: “Sure, I’d love to!” I’d been teaching my Korean students how to issue and respond to invitations, and all of them kept saying, “No, I’m sorry, I can’t,” or “No, thank you, I’m busy”; I was trying to get them to learn how to say yes. My life has been all about saying yes lately, which is a big revelation for me, because I’m used to saying no. But wait a minute, what am I talking about? It’s not like I’ve sat around on my thumbs for the past forty years due to an insurmountable indolence–I’ve done a hell of a lot; so much that I wonder if I can even get it all into one book..... Well, of course, I can get it all in one book–I’m a natural condenser and distiller. But to evoke the richness and texture of the life I’ve led in words is a particularly daunting challenge.

What I mean by saying yes, I guess, is that I’m learning to agree to my lighter side even when my tired old negative voices try to talk me out of it. No, that’s crazy, they say. Or maybe it’s just a renaissance of this kind of power in my life–I’ve had a long fallow period during which I’ve felt drained and hopeless, ready to ease on down the road all the way out of here. Well, I did ease on down that road; kinda liked what I saw at the end of it, but decided to come back and stick it out for some reason still obscure to me. It has something to do with healing, and I know I have to start on myself.

I’ve never had problems saying yes to things that feed my insatiable hunger for knowledge and adventure–even danger. I’ve always done it, instinctively, always to more or less intense results. The problem is that “intense” is not all that sustainable. What I’m learning to say yes to these days are my quirkier whims, the desires that are not serious, the ones that simply jazz me up and make me smile–things I’ve always denied myself because I’ve been so serious about myself and the way I’ve lived my life in the past. I think I may have looked joyful and frivolous at times on the outside, but I was all troubled thoughts and karmic worries on the inside. Now I’m finally learning how to take it easy on myself, and to say yes to silly little whims rather than saving all my zest for the voluptuous, grand ones, which are always quite an effort to come up with and carry out, anyway.

Since returning to the land of the living after my long sojourn into the underworld with the Lady Lymphoma at my side, I have been full of puckish little desires, and I’m finally starting to act upon them. It started with a belly dancing class I took a couple of weeks ago, which threw my back out, leading me into a deep experience of self healing, then into one of the best weekends I’ve had since recovering. It always amazes me how much more I grow while dealing with pain than I would have had the pain been absent.

Last weekend was all about skating. On Friday and Saturday, I taped the full seven hours of the National Figure Skating Championships, which boiled down to about two hours of actually skating that I watched Sunday morning. All day Sunday, I was thinking about my own years of figure skating, and especially focusing on the fact that I still imagine and dream about landing difficult jumps all the time. God, I thought, I’d love to do that again, but discarded it as a daydream.

The next day was a holiday (MLKJ day), so I went to Venice Beach to rent some skates. They only have roller blades out there, which I hate, but I got a pair anyway, and power-stroked my way down to Malibu on the cement skating path as smoothly as Hans Brinker on his frozen river.

Once I’d had a taste of the certain sort of glide that rollerblades offer, I wanted more, so that night I went back to my roots, to a roller rink, where I rented a foul pair of beige skates (quads, darlings, the only REAL kind of roller skates) with orange wheels and hit the newly re-surfaced glazed-wood floor. Within five minutes, I was whizzing around the rink on long, powerful edges as if I had just hit the floor for the warm-up at the world championships or something. What a geek! All the cool, dance-oriented recreational skaters were giving me the bug eye. But then some people who were even geekier than me arrived and started doing REALLY GEEKY tricks in the center of the rink, so I didn’t stick out too badly. It was weird how my body remembered.

For a few songs (middle-of-the-road dance hits and soul), I worked on perfecting a series of really fast dance steps that just came to me out of the blue–I think it was “The Fourteen Step,” but I’m not sure. Then I really started to get the itch to do some jumps–not appropriate at public session, but I did a few waltz jumps (just a little half turn, starting forward, landing backwards), and the landing felt so solidly pleasurable–almost in a purely sensual way–that my raring-to-go body was urging me to try something harder. I managed to quell its pleas and stick to some funky backwards footwork that impressed the hardcore rink rats and got me out of there without risking major injury. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the idea that it might be fun to coax those jumps I’d dreamed of since I was a kid back into reality.

Instead of waking up the next day to a more mature outlook on that particular whim, I was more excited by it than ever. I ignored the voices in my head that were telling me I was too old, not thinking straight, the biggest DORK in the world, and made an appointment for a private lesson at another rink, out in the valley near Cal State Northridge. The woman who’s going to teach me took lessons in my hometown, Bakersfield, with Natalie Dunn, who was world champ when I was a kid, and a hero to me and many other munchkin skaters. Her name is Jamie, and she agreed with me that it would be a hoot and that I should at least give it a try. Hey, I’m not totally unrealistic–I know I probably won’t be able to train hard enough to do a perfect double axel again, or anything like that, but I’d settle for a single one. Oh, and a double loop. I’d love to do a double loop again. Even if you don’t know what it is, doesn’t the sound of that just tickle you?

My first lesson is next Tuesday, and I will certainly keep the gentle reader apprised of any progress made in this latest foray of mine. The idea of doing some jumps again has effervesced my spirit so much that I will never hesitate again to say “Sure, I’d love too” when a quirky little voice somewhere deep inside my psyche invites me to do something purely meaningless, fun and joymaking. In fact, the lift I’ve gotten just from imagining the possibility has also reminded me that I once knew how to fly. And if I can do a double axel again (well, okay, maybe I WILL go for a double), I'll know that remembering how to fly is just a twitch of the wings away.

Oh, and by the way, my 40th birthday is coming up on February 10, and I'd just ADORE a new pair of skates!

Categories: skating, backstory, transformation