This afternoon Destroyer had a birthday party to go to at the Southgate Roller Rink, a nondescript barn in West Seattle. I dropped her outside with her mother and took La Serpiente to look for a place to run- she recently expressed a desire to do track, which means being able to run a mile.
So we ran up and down on a muddy path until she’d done 800 metres, which was enough for her when she wanted to go on the swings at an adjacent playground.
It got cold, so we moved on to the library and got ten books, and then went to the nearest coffee shop before heading back to the roller rink.
Inside, the rink was a low ceilinged, darkened room, filled with children spinning in circles while a disco ball glittered and scattered dots of light across us all. The staff looked like they were straight out of central casting for a Whip It sequel; sleeve tattoos, randomly dyed streaks in their hair, punkish clothes like some kind of greebo from any of the last five decades … glorious.
We bundled the girls back into the car and drove home, my decision to have them take skating lessons validated by Destroyer’s uncanny competence on eight wheels.
At home, we started to read a new bedtime story for the girls, picked out by La Serpiente: a translated Swedish novel about a gorilla with a typewriter in Lisbon in the 1930s. Not everything is as you’d first expect.