Sweet Route

In about three days, I'm going to have to try and say this in front of a congregation of people. I figure I better give it a test drive here first; as with many things for me, it may be easier to type than to say.

When I was a little, little boy; let's say, from age conception to nine, we used to come home to Bedford, PA very often throughout the year for major holidays: Easter, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Each holds extremely precious memories, and make up the very fine fibers that thread me together as the man I am today.

For the Spring and Summer trips, there was one tradition that I looked forward to with bated breath, and asked with garrulous breath the entire eight-hour drive out to Bedford from Cincinnati each time: Sweet Route.

When my begging and pleading would finally cause the family to cave to my needs to stop me from trying to swindle them, the journey began.

Down to the garage we'd go. Inside that garage, Tom Bailey, my grandfather, had a place for every item, and every item was in it's place. It was always dark in that garage, but each tool, fluid, plant, bag of soil, wheelbarrow, and 24-pack of soda was meticulously placed so he could find it in the dark wearing a blindfold and mittens. Still today, that garage has a beautiful and unmatched smell of earth, brick, well-used tools, and clean car; not a bad smell at all, but a smell that makes you stop, close your eyes, and inhale every last particle in the air until your lungs are full, and you want to exhale so slowly because you don't want to lose the taste at the back of your throat.

The garage door would bang open as the gears rattled and bounced on the ceiling above our heads, and we'd all climb into his Buick road-boat. This car has no age to me - it's been around since I was conscious of vehicles, but there are no scratches or dents on it's glistening white outside, the dark blue seat fabric doesn't have a tear or a stain and is soft as a kitten, no scratches on the dashboard, and rides as smooth as water on ice. Tom was the only man who could back this massive road vessel out of the tiny garage in one fell swoop, and remains so today.

My spot was unchallenged: the front middle of the deep blue bench seat. Even as a lightweight 40 pounds, my rump sank into the plushness of it. Three reasons why this seat was mine:

#1: I could squeeze right up next to our pilot pap, who always smiled and chuckled at me no matter what I did.

#2: I had a perfect view of the road ahead. Now of course I had to loosen the belt buckle, wiggle up to the edge of the seat, and strain to get my eyes above the dashboard. But my eyesight was very important for the journey ahead.

#3: I could see and report the digital temperature readout.

Directly in front of my little excited face was a glowing green digital readout that showed the strength of the fan in the car and the current interior temperature. Every time that temperature changed even one degree Fahrenheit, I'd shout out the change, "68 degrees!"...."69 degrees!"...."70 degrees!" While other members of my family (mom, dad, brother, Nana) would tell me to "shush" or "calm down," pap would always encourage it. He'd say things like, "what's the temperature now, Ben," or "temperature report!" He'd laugh so hard at how excited I was and thanked me for the report, and drove on without his eyes ever cracking from the road ahead.

That's the first of two very important lessons in this story. Pap has always been happiest when he brought joy to other people. It could be entirely mundane and uninteresting to pap; but if you were happy and having a good time, pap delighted in your joy. And his joy was cyclical. If pap was happy, he'd get ralled up and tell stories and be on top of his game with wit, which made everyone else laugh and be happy. And as I said, if everyone else was happy, pap was happy. It was a beautiful thing. To truly delight in someone else's joy without jealousy or sarcasm....it's something I wish all of us could be good enough to do.

So through the streets of Bedford we'd gently cruise, all the while the adults talking over my head about who lived where and reminiscing about stories long before I was even a thought to bring into the world. I heard none of it: my giant brown eyes were fixed on the road ahead, waiting for the turn I knew signaled the adventure I thirsted for. I'd stay close to pap - he was warm, and had that smell that only each of us loves about our elders. This ninja-like focus (ok, ninja after 12 cups of coffee) was only broken by the occasional, "status report! -- "73 degrees, pap!"

And then we'd turn onto Sweet Route. Never was a road in history named more adequately for what it meandered through, not even "Main Street" or "West Street." I want you to picture the quaint township of Pleasantville, that blossoming drive in Rain Man, and the winding beauty of Big Fish - combine those together, and you'll almost be able to see Sweet Route. The road was far out in the country, and meandered for a number of miles over gentle hills, winding through lush forest, and traced an old creek that spent it's twilight years picking it's way through the soft underbrush at the foot of the tall trees.

At this arrival, my grandfather nearly had to stop the car to avoid hitting my eyeballs, which were glued, unblinkingly, to the road ahead. You see, in the warm months, Eastern Box Turtles would travel from the refreshing coolness of the shaded creek up to the road above, and warm themselves on the toasty asphalt in the afternoon sun. Loaded with cardboard boxes in the trunk of the car, our prize was to collect every turtle we found along the road.

If there was one small, darker black spot on the road, I'd shout with excitement and bounce up and down in my seat, and pap would gently ease the car to the side of this beautiful, country road. On a good day, we could head home with five turtles; however, even turtleless, there was never a bad day on these trips.

Once back at pap's house, I'd keep these turtles out back for the whole week we were home. Each one would be named, we'd have pretend adventures in the long grass, and my parents would acquire tomatoes and lettuce for me to feed them. On the rare occasion, pap helped me sneak the turtles into the kitchen, which was off of the back porch. As the turtles would crawl and claw their way around the linoleum, Nana would shout in surprise and frustration, and pap would just laugh and laugh at Nana's dismay at the reptilian intruders. I thought it was a gas. Pictures of this line nan and pap's refrigerator.

Then the hardest part of the trip came: we had to take the turtles home at the end of the week. My beloved companions, who I had fallen in love with so quickly and known for such a short time, had to be returned to where they came from. We loaded them into their cardboard box in the back of the impeccable road boat, and headed back out towards Sweet Route.

When pap and I had selected a beautiful spot along the side of the road, he softly pulled the car to the curb and he would carry the box for me, as the weight of five turtles at once was far too powerful for my little arms. But paps arms were very strong. The selected location was usually well shaded, quiet, and had a gentle slope down the burbling creek below.

In the beginning, I would throw a fit and cry, shout, and make a tantrum about letting my turtles go. I had become so close, and never understood why they had to go back to the woods, and found it so unfair and so unjust that my turtles had to be let go. But over the years it became easier to say goodbye, and I began to understand that they were never my turtles. Pap helped me to understand that. You can fall so deeply in love with something you've known for such little time; but to understand it's interconnectedness to the rest of the universe, beyond your love of it, allows you to say goodbye knowing it's in better hands than you could ever conceive. And with that realization, there comes a peace.

Eventually the tradition ended, as our drives out along Sweet Route yielded little to no turtles year after year, but the memory of those beautiful, warm, Spring afternoon drives is clear as the perfectly washed windshield of pap's Buick.

I will always love my grandfather.

Roller Freaking Derby

There may come a time in your life when you'll be sitting on a backporch with some close mates, sipping a frosty beverage and laughing into the evening over the insanities you pulled in days when your jeans fit better and your credit card debt wasn't so high. You may pause to reflect while a story drones on in the background, and you'll tilt your head back in your plastic deck chair and smile contently at the stars as the hoppy goodness makes your memories sweeter and funnier than they were when they happened. And then, from the celestial ceiling above, you may catch a moving speck of light that drifts across the pallet of the night sky; and if you're lucky enough, it gets bigger and bigger as Earth's gravity coerces it closer. And if you're even luckier, this little xenomorphic lightning bug will catch on fire as it hits the atmosphere, and will plummet in fiery glory to the field behind your house. As you and your compatriots stumble through the grass to find what happened, you'll begin to detect bits of evidence that will start to reveal a story - you may find grass scorched at its tips, scraps of rock laying haphazardly around, or the beer can your buddy crushed and chucked into the field in the passion of reliving a tale.

And once you've gathered that evidence, your mind begins to formulate what might be at the end of this yellow brick road. You'll either discover an amazing explosion of flashing lights and beeping buzzers as the door of an alien space craft creaks open to reveal that aliens from another planet are actually the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, and they brought you chicken wings; OR, it's going to be a piece of really boring, smoldering space rock that you could've created yourself by leaving a muffin in the microwave for 23 minutes.

A couple weeks ago I went to the Cincinnati Rollergirls Rollerderby; specifically, The School of Hard Knox. Much like your theoretical sky light, the evidence I found along the way slowly framed the picture of what was to come. By the end, you decide if I found a space rock, or an amazing extra-terrestrial leviathan of awesome glory.

I arrived at the Cincinnati Gardens promptly at 6:15 p.m., for the first bout to begin at 7 p.m.

Space Rock Evidence Item 1: I couldn't quite remember what the Cincinnati Gardens was used for. I feel like I had seen a hockey game there, but Mighty Ducks or Cyclones was beyond what I knew. There was a chance that I had seen a Silverbacks indoor soccer game in the area, but that memory died as fast as the team did. Maybe a circus, or a convention? At any rate, the setting gave me a feeling of dilapidated, multi-use generalization that you get from finding an old roll of duct tape you're not sure is still sticky anymore.

Once inside, I waved down a buddy of mine, Danny, who I knew from high school and was the valedictorian of our graduating class, now an engineer for G&E. Let me just make this clear - I can say with near OCD certainty that he was the only valedictorian within a two-mile radius. But a decent into an off-kilter sport as an academic is exciting as the descent into a foreign cavern by me.

Space Rock Evidence Item 2: Soon after I had connected with Danny, Tina Turner leapt from around a corner as she exploded from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and started skating towards us at breakneck speed. Two thoughts crossed my mind: First, dear god let her be looking at someone behind us. Second, if she is to make us fight in a giant steel sphere and then destroy us, please let it be over with quickly. But she came to a screeching halt in the style you did to spray your little sister with snow when skiing, and sweetly asked, "you guys want a program?" Taking them hesitantly, we reached out our hands, waiting to have them bitten off by the techno cyber-chick. "Have fun," she touted, and sped off to feed Mel Gibson to the lions.

Danny and I found the entrance to the arena, and stepped in through the tunnel. Sweetly enough for us, our contact (a Jammer for the Cincinnati Rollergirls) had secured us floor seats in the area known as the "suicide seats." Now, they're very adamant that they're no longer called this, but we all know what the are. The "suicide seats" are where the players land when they get a thorough butt-whooping from an opponent, and go flying into the audience. Yeah, we get to catch the defeated. We got second-row seats on steel, fold-up chairs, with 40 minutes until game time.

Space Rock Evidence Item #3: A big banner over the arena declared "$1 PBRs until 7:30." First, "$1 anything" at any location immediately helps set the environment. You've never been offered "$1 caviar," "$1 cappuccino" or "$1 monkeys." But this just wasn't your average $1 well drink or hotdog special: these were $1 PBRs. Sure, PBR is an experience all unto itself; but $1 PBR: you're talkin' culture, baby! Danny raised a questioning eye brow towards me, and I immediately nodded with an understanding gesture. Our hands were frosty and full of PBR goodness within minutes.

We were seated along one of the ends of the track, an elliptical slalom of destruction about the length of a basketball court. Single rows of chairs lined the long end to our left, where the athletes would sit and cheer for more blood, and along the other end was a flat wall, from behind the scorekeepers calculated away in safety. In the far corner from us were the announcers, of whom I couldn't understand a single thing the entire match because either A: They had been involved in $1 PBR for the past six hours; B: Their faces were full of nachos with cheese and pork rinds found outside; C: The microphones were technology from 1974; or D: all of the above.

Beyond these walls were regular arena-style seating up either side of the long stretches of track, and in the middle were the referees and more scorekeepers, ever slowly circling on their roller skates denoting the lead jammer and fouls. You have to have guts, or be insane, to stand in the middle of this womanly whirlwind for three hours. By game time, there were over 1,200 people seated in psychotic spectatorship.

Space Rock Evidence Item #4: The announcement for the national anthem came, which more or less sounded like "murgle mck burble niner STAND UP murgle blip scratch tickle." When the crowd rose, most shakily from the PBR extravaganza, I noticed a golden retriever just hanging out on the floor to my left. The owner, looming overhead, was clearing looking around at the crowd and pointing things out to his friend; thus, this was not a seeing eye dog. I can confidently say that I've never been to an indoor sporting event where pets were allowed to just "chill." Can you image at The Masters, as Tiger begins to come down from his backswing, you heard "woof!"? First case of canine proctology club removal, I guarantee it. Oh, and the dog was wearing an American Flag scarf - "America, f* yeah!"

As our singer crooned on in America's tribute to women beating the crap out of each other, a bat quickly darted in and out of the spotlight highlighting the voice of our country. Yes ladies and gentlemen, Roller Derby is played in the Bat Cave. Again, do you think sweepers in the Olympics have to brush away winged rats as they polish the ice for the rock? No.

So lets recap before we hit game time: $1 PBRs, Tina Turner, dogs, bats, and duct tape arena. Got it? Awesome. Game on.

The lights dimmed down and the crowd began to roar, all on their feet, as laser lights and your usual arena start-up music began to thunder the stadium (sadly, it was NOT Space Jam). Each athlete (or homicidal octo-wheeled maniac), would come from behind a curtain, skate at lap, and sit at her respective bench. Names like "Sadistic Sadie," "Polly Rocket," and "Shirley Temptya" were shouted over the speakers. We apparently were behind Sadie's mother, as she literally lost. her. mind. as Sadie was introduced. Perfectly normal-looking soccer mom - except with a hidden agenda of wheeled doom.

The game began, and Danny, myself, and my boss and his family (joined shortly before gametime) watched on in anticipation at something we have never seen before. Here's the basic premise from an EXTREMELY layman's point of view, and what my fuzzy memory can handle:

Two teams of girls (I think there's about six on each team) begin to skate around the loop. After a few seconds, two other girls, one from each team, begin to skate after the pack. These two psychotic murderers are known as the jammers (and this has NOTHING to do with delicious toasty toppings). To begin the round (which is relatively short), a jammer must pass all the girls of the opposing team. Once she does that, she can score one point each time she passes the entire group again. Her teammates, while blocking the opposing jammer from passing, can push and fling her forward to get through the blockers of the other team. There are a bunch of these little rounds in each session, and the jammer can call the session over at any time by smacking her hips (which oddly looks like the "su*& it" move). They can't outright punch, kick, or headbutt each other - but full on hits with dropping the shoulder - not only allowed, but awesome.

There is a Junior Varsity game and a Varsity game, both of which are equally exciting (unlike HS soccer, which was like watching Bumblebee ball, and then the World Cup). The girls skate around in this circle at breakneck speeds trying to maneuver between each other, wearing black helmets, sparkly tu-tus, rhinestone onesies, fishnets, biker gloves, and even war face paint. Mad Max meets WWE meets Roll Bounce. Yes.

I loved every minute. You pick your heroes early, and cheer your heart out for them. Whenever a Jammer makes it through the blockers, the arena goes nuts. Every time there's a big hit, the crowd goes wild, like a fight in hockey. I kid you not: by the end of the night, three girls were carried out on backboards. One, while being paraded out by paramedics, raised the devil horns. We call that "bad - ass."

I nearly forgot to mention! Between JV and Varsity, there was a halftime performance by Cincinnati Cool. It was Roll Bounce incarnate, skating in beat and time, jumping over each other, and just trying to look smooth on roller skates. Who knew roller skating could not only be hardcore, but hip too?

My favorite part of the entire night was this one, single, glorious, kiss my @$$ moment. The Cincinnati Roller Girls were ahead by at least 60 points, and there was NO hope of the opposing team ever coming back. Before the match had started, I had picked my player on the opposing team I wanted to watch: Goblin. A woman standing about 5"10, Goblin wore a green helmet and white facepaint with her eyes and mouth blacked out. She looked scary in the program, so I assumed her level of awesomeness as a Jammer was high.

She provided the performance of a sprinter: strong and scary in the beginning, but tired out quickly. By about 3/4 through the final match, she looked like a lazy little pre-teen aimlessly skating around Castle Skateland - as a JAMMER! Sadistic Sadie, our home town girl, whizzed by again and again like a moth around a light, racking up the points faster than Michael Jordan alone on half-court. But, the problem was, Goblin was a trash talker. Even when beaten, she had a big mouth that liked to fire, especially at Sadistic Sadie as she whizzed by Goblin each time.

On one of these advantageous passes, Goblin shouted out some insult to Ms. Sadie; inaudible to the crowd, but certainly stinging to the lead Jammer. As Sadistic Sadie passed Goblin, a gleam shot through her eye, which usually signifies for most of us brilliance, or pure evil. S.S. slowed her speed to a casual drift, and allowed Goblin to catch distance. As the fatigued skater closed the gap, Sadie smiled a self-satisfied grin, lowered a shoulder, and threw her entire body weight into Goblin as she attempted to skate by. Goblin's exhausted, yet war-painted body, flew a good six feet through the air before she painfully thudded to the arena floor. The crowd went wild; and as Sadie skated on in satisfied triumph, Goblin brought her hands to her hips in pathetic loss, signifying defeat.

The Cincinnati Roller Girls compete one Saturday each month. Tickets aren't expensive, and it is an athletic and cultural event to behold. Go. See. a. match. Wherever you are in the country: look up your local team and go see a match. It's 100% real, and 130% fun. It seriously worth it = you find a hero, get committed to the match, and will really miss something if you blink. The Bengals lose, the Reds are a toss up: the Cincinnati Rollergirls will entertain, whether they rollaway in victory, or are carried out on a stretcher.