DDOP-13 Teal

SJ Sharks

Description:

To me, teal is the color of ice skating.

Transcript:

My friend Fran asked me to talk about the color Teal.

Originally, I was going to combine it with turquoise, but I decided it would be cheating. Besides, teal it’s a distinctly different color.

To me, teal is the color of ice skating.

I don’t remember learning to ice skate; it’s just something my mother and I always did when I was a kid. I remember skating with her on Deal Lake in New Jersey, and on the foot-thick rippled ice of the frozen reservoir in Georgetown, when they hadn’t yet frozen over the baseball diamond.

I remember weekend trips to the ski resorts in Loveland and Vail where we would skate instead of ski – I lived in Colorado for seven years and never learned to ski – and I would complain because I was wearing itchy thermal socks over tights under my jeans and I would be sweaty and cold and skated out long before the adults were ready to go home.

I remember holding Benjamin’s hand when we skated at ice rinks in Colorado – both of us in those double-bladed skates designed for wobbly children and Donny Osmond.

And I remember, in the winter before we all wanted those sneakers with roller skate wheels attached, that my friends and I would go to the rink at the Y in Arvada Colorado twice a week after school to participate in the open skate.

I never took lessons – none of us did – but we learned to scissor our feet and use the right edges, and do simple spins and tiny jumps even without formal training. We learned to shoot the duck and race around the rink, and sometimes we even wore cute little skating skirts to do it, but mostly we just wore jeans.

After we moved to California, Mom and I stopped skating, until the year before I met Fuzzy. That was the year the Sharks moved to San Jose, and they opened their training center for open skating in order to offset costs.

Mom and I went to one of the first sessions, but the rental skates were horrible, so we went directly to the pro-shop to buy proper figure skates. I’ve never been a particular hockey fan, but the rookies have to work in the pro-shop and when a soulful Russian or Finnish hockey player is holding your foot in his huge hand and asking you, in accented English what size shoe you wear, and saying “You vill com vatch us play, yes?” How can you say no?

And yet, I never made it to a live Sharks game, even though I lived only a short walk away from the Shark Tank for several years.

In fact, the only time we ever went there was for figure skating shows – it was a tradition that I went every year with Mom. But then she moved to Baja Sur, Mexico, and I moved to Texas, where the ice shows never come.

And my skates, my beautiful white figure skates, sit unused on the shelf of my hall closet, their blades protected by rubber guards in… guess what color? Naah, I’ll just tell you: teal.

Links & References:

Credits:

  • The Bathtub Mermaid: Tales from the Tub is written and produced by Melissa A. Bartell, and is recorded and produced using the BossJock iPad app and Audacity.
  • Bathtub Mermaid album art was created by Rebecca Moran of Moran Media
  • Music used for the opening and closing is David Popper’s “Village Song” as performed by Cello Journey. This music came from the podsafe music archive at Mevio’s Music Alley, which site is now defunct.

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