And now, the conclusion to our harrowing tale.

I arrived home from work to find that my wife was ready to discuss the
idea of roller blading that very day.  This won’t happen, I thought.

Then she proceeded to become her own hype-woman and publicist.  She told
me about how she could do all these different things on blades.  I
pulled up a YouTube clip to show my sons what she was talking about
since they had no idea what was happening.  The guy in the video
demonstrated various skills one should practice if he or she wants to
become a solid skater.  Meanwhile, my wife sitting on the couch
chimed in.  “Oh, I can do that.”  “Yeah, that’s easy.”  Meanwhile,
I was thinking about the distinct possibility that she would either fall
and dislocate her shoulder for the fifth time OR she would flare up her
old ankle problems.  Either way in my mind, this doesn’t end well for
her.  There was also a possibility that her roller blades would fail.
Let’s be honest, they were purchased at Walmart, probably in the late
1990s.  Which ultimately means cheap plastic materials that might
completely fall apart as soon as they are stressed at all.

An image comes to mind in which she straps her feet in and goes to push off
into her stride while both roller blades rapidly hit their failure
point leaving her on the pavement, a trip to the ER in her immediate
future.  I was not secretly hoping for this outcome.  I am not that bad of a
person.  Not only would an injury be bad for her, but it would also
put more work on me.  And she would blame me for challenging her to do
it.

But back to reality.  She described her skating prowess like Michael
Scott in the office and his ice skating abilities.  I laugh, skeptical
at best.  To hear her speak of these abilities, one would think she
could have earned a job at an old drive-in restaurant where the
waitresses skate out to the cars to take and deliver orders.  Or she
could have earned her way on to a team of female roller derby skaters.
She denies being able to do serious tricks like one might see in the
X-games or at a nearby skate park on the various rails, pipes, and I
ran out of names of things at a skate park.  She denies being able to
do a triple Salchow (which Google told me was not “sow cow”).
Hey, how would I know?  I think to myself, isn’t that just in ice
skating?  But I don’t say this out loud.  There is already too much
out in the open pertaining to our argument.

I tell her she could star in a remake of the amazing movie from my
childhood (that was constantly on TBS) called Airborne.  I could talk
about this movie for days, but let me try to cut it back to just the
important stuff.  Airborne was an early 90s movie about a guy who was
forced to live temporarily with his relatives in Cincinnati and has
difficulty fitting in as he is a Californian who matches all the
stereotypes, thus struggles to find his place in this new group of
people.  But the thing that eventually helps him carve his spot in the
clique is his skating prowess and pants-ing the local
jerk/rival/blonde bad guy from another school.  This lead (in actual society) to a whole
movement of teenagers taking up roller blading and pants-ing people in
a doomed effort to fit in.  I made that last part up.  In the final
part of the movie, the rival teens from two schools meet each other in
teams at the top of a hill (it is Cincinatti after all) and have a
race to the parking lot of the Reds Stadium.

Where we live, it happens to be on a large, steep, curvy set of hills
and I suggested that she could be the heroine of the story who moved
from another state (which she did at one point) and leads the team
down the hills to the high school stadium (since my town does not have
a pro team) by skating her butt off, jumping obstacles, skating down
stairs, etc.  I am smiling just thinking about it.

She denies my idea straight up.  Should I have expected something else?

While listening to the tutorial, she claims that on roller blades she
can do the following:
Turn 180 degrees
Make step-over turns
Tandem skate

Mind you, there are 15 skills he mentions in the video and she thinks she can
maybe do 3 of them.  But she also claims she can skate way better than those
people you see at the roller rink holding the rail or constantly falling.

She also mentions she used to practice roller blading in her grandma’s house.
What?
Literally, I said, “What?”

Yes, apparently her grandparents let her skate inside the house.  I
don’t quite understand what she would have gotten out of doing this inside
since there was mostly carpet and the non-carpeted area was pretty limited in terms of space.

So we take the roller blades and the family down to the park.  She dons the blades for the first time since the new millennium and I watch closely for signs that the material is ready to snap.  But she manages to pull them on and secure them.  She eases forward with more balance checks than a amateur gymnast on the balance beam.  She seems to sort of find her balance and presses onward faster.  Truth be told, when she picks up speed, she seems much more at ease.  When she does a quick turn, she nearly topples, but catches herself.  She avoids the fancier tricks and her maximum speed is probably like 4.5 mph.  I guess it was more than I expected, given that I thought there was going to be an injury.

Now I know why they call her Blades.