Roller Skating

This Wednesday we took our sixth graders roller skating, since our seventh and eighth graders had gone to the haunted house and our fifth graders had gone to Messiah College. I was excited because I don't know how to skate. We drove to the rink and our kids ran to get skates from the counter. I checked out a size nine and laced them on tightly. I didn't want to worry about my skates falling off while I was falling down.

A few minutes later I was experiencing the joy of discovery: skating is hard. Perhaps more exasperating than the dozens of times I hit the deck was that every time I tried to push off, my skate would glide forwards while I tumbled backwards. But I refused to give up and about half an hour in I suddenly realized that I was skating. I was so excited that I promptly flipped out and kissed the wood again in a flailing mess of arms and legs.

As I lay stiffly in bed that night it occurred to me that my hour skating that day resembled my experience in Camden. Often it seems like every step I take pushes me somewhere I did not intend or causes me to fall. All my effort seems to be filled with frustration and uncertainty. I don't know how to do things and it seems the only way to figure it out is to do what I don't know how to do. But all of a sudden something will work. Something I tell a kid will have the desired effect. I will take a stand and someone will respect it. I will be skating, actually skating, and in these times I feel like I could keep going forever and never tire. But it's difficult to hold the form and I can't coast very long. Sooner or later I'll slip and, trying to remember what I did before, proceed by trial and error, longing to re-attain my previous success but meeting with only frustration. Until, of course, I unexpectedly get it again, for as long as that might last.

I have never done much of what I'm doing in Camden right now; I have little experience with kids and even less with the issues that the city and it's people struggle with. My daily experience repeatedly makes me painfully aware of this. But every once in awhile I'll do something right, and get a little hint of how to succeed. From that point on, while still clueless, I try to emulate what worked before, sometimes with success, and sometimes not. Those times when I don't know what to do and it shows are very difficult. But those short moments when I seem to understand are shattering and intoxicating and seem to build on one another.

I may not know yet how to skate, but I have glimpsed enough of actually doing it that I cannot think of giving up.