Word of the Week - 41

Word of the Week:  WOBBLE

From 1940 until 1966, Pasadena was home of the Winter Garden, a vast-seeming, free-standing ice rink that briefly served as location for a live weekly music-and-ice-skating tv show called Frosty Frolics.  That was around 1951.  I think it must have run a bit longer than the one year, for I remember it, and Your Hit Parade, as family viewing.  Frosty Frolics was likely the inspiration, however wrong-minded, for my one attempt at ice skating.  Weak ankles, my neighbor and friend Susie Miller declared.  That I went on, not too far into the future,  to dance en pointe never quite erased the sense of failure brought on by ankles that wobbled.  My very first time, yet my inability to achieve instant perfection kept me from trying again, even wanting to try again.  I also never learned to ride a bicycle.

I am grateful to have survived childhood without any bullying that I can remember.  I was capable of creating that sense of insufficiency unaided through harsh and unreasonable comparisons.  Susie and I were sidewalk roller skating pals and I did not wobble on four wheels.  I was solid and not accident prone.  I was also timid about activities that seemed - and sometimes were - dangerous and felt myself shrink in stature as others plunged into new adventures.  Unknown at that time was my future assignment as a contemplative.  The things I couldn't do well mattered more than talents I couldn't name or understand.  Had it not been for ballet, for dancing in general, for hopscotch, jump robe and being moderately okay at baseball, I would have been an elementary school dud.  Dodge ball was scary and playground equipment (probably now against the law) like the rings, and bars (the dreaded "skin the cat," in which I hated being upside down), and such gave me the heebie-jeebies.

There is, I swear, something about emotions that accompany the onset of Christmas that bring up memories, welcome or not.  For the moment I trust that these thoughts of, if not humiliation, then certainly not triumph have come to be acknowledged and released.  They've been taking up shelf space for far too long.  I still wobble, only now I wobble better.  I have become the definition of wobbling.