Sixteen Wheels and a Disco Ball

My mom grew up in a within-city-limits house in Cynthiana, Kentucky; but way out of town, past the Convenience Store and the river, past Oakwood Baptist, past Larry's Bar & Grill, way way way out of town - you get deep in country. You get into curvy roads and tobacca rows and one-lane bridges. Out there, you get to the house where my dad lived; an eighth of a mile from Charley's Roller Rink. That's how much my mom liked to roller skate when she was early twenty something... And that's how convenient it was for my dad to work there.

As Dad cleaned the skates and polished the floors, Mom came with girlfriends, donning her own personal pair - the cute kind with bobby balls at the end of the strings - the only time my mother has ever been fashionable. (This is around the part that she would say I begin romanticizing things.)

My mother, six-feet-two with roller skates (though she would claim five-feet-fourteen inches) skated gracefully around the rink - forwards, backwards, sideways, dipping under the limbo stick with ease - long deep brown hair and sparkling hazel eyes... the ones she gave me. My dad, five-feet-ten before the skates (do the math) falling in love with this younger, modestly beautiful woman. Not the skater she was, he romanced her with gaiety - my dad, the non-stop joker, the entertainer, the 'glass half-full' older man sweeping her off her skates before she knew it.

I like to think of them during the Couples Skate. I like to think of Dad's manager sensing his anxiety to skate with her and letting him off the clock for just one slow song. The lights go real low and the Disco ball casts white dots like jewels on the hard wood floor - Dad struggling to stay up, Mom skating backwards, holding his hands, and them seeing so much future in each other's eyes... in each other's same hazel eyes. Eyes sparkling like the disco ball - jewels yet to come.