A year and three days ago, our local ice rink shuttered. It had a slow but inevitable descent, and when its last day was announced, we lamented its demise and our loss. We still feel it; our "backup" rink is four times as far away, it caters to skaters paying big bucks to learn figure skating and who play in their in-house youth hockey league, it subjugates the public skaters and those of us who want only to exercise and to get our kids private lessons on large sheets of ice (the public skate is on a converted rollerskating rink - much smaller than the 200-foot NHL rink reserved for the big payers).
I miss our old rink a lot. We had many months of great lessons, sessions and other hijinks there. The crowd was much more pedestrian than that of our "backup" rink. There, the parents drive in in big fuckin' SUVs, deploy their asshole kids and lapse immediately into smart phone or tablet trances - without paying one iota of attention to their asshole kids' practice. At our old rink, sure, there were folks enraptured with their devices, but many more huddled together, shared snacks, camaraderie and interest in what was going on on the ice.
So when we knew that it was our last public skate at the old place, my pal who I met there decided to make custom CDs with the music WE wanted to hear while we skated, just like the show tunes and Disney theme songs the figure skaters practiced to. I compiled a playlist and burned it. I asked the awesome staff dude to play a track and he said he'd play the whole thing. And he did. It was the first time we heard good music there, even though all the other bad music didn't matter, since it was bad music at OUR rink.
Here's my partial route when I switched on the "Map My Ride" app while on the ice:
I don't remember leaving the ice so severely that one lap.
And here, of course is our playlist from that last day.
We sure miss the place.
Tonight - The Residence. (by several requests)
Warm up & dry off by the faux-erplace.
bye-ee!
whrr ... clik!
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