Datebook: Monday, October 22nd ~ 2007

I have just completed what in another life amounts to driving a Volkswagen bus to a Grateful Dead concert, or maybe it was more like becoming the 30th pilgrim en route to the shrine of Canterbury Tales fame.

In the planning stages I thought of it as a cleansing of the mind and soul that marks the end of Junior Grand Prixs and before Sectionals begins. You know, those twenty-three days from today until November13th that seem calm and tranquil but in reality are just the eye of the storm.

So my friends, perhaps noticing from previous years that annually my left eye starts twitching, I start practicing for non-existence poetry slams that some suspect masks a mild case of Tourette’s Syndrome, and that I tend to carve pumpkins with skate wearing witches, asked me to go on a journey with them.

Initially, it was a bit of a hard sell because it involved riding in a bus for seven hours, but when it was verified that an ice-rink was not within a hundred miles, I was in. The details were sketchy, but the basic facts were: be on the bus on Friday morning at 3:00 am and be returned to your car on Saturday night at midnight.

It sounded plausible in August.

On Thursday night, I felt like I could have made a better plan by having elective surgery, like having my tonsils or appendix removed. My husband, lord of all remote controls and the alarm clock, set the alarm for 2:00 am.

I am not a great sleeper in any scenario, except when my favorite show is on television. I tend to sleep in anticipation or perhaps resemble one of the watchers on Meercat Manor who is always peering out at the ready. So my night began with waking every fifteen minutes to peek at the clock to compute the frequent fourteen minutes interludes. Unfortunately, my husband has a period of time during his slumber when he rests on his right side. When adding the height differential of his two pillows, his head, the sheet, blanket, and the autumn quilt, this requires what amounts to a one-arm push-up on my part to see over his cocooned form to view the clock on his night stand.

What can I say? One more go-for-the-burn-inch and I would have discovered that the time was really 11:45 and not 1:45, but alas, I was showered and dressed with a two hour window of time to spare, well before my scheduled departure time.

I drove to the Park-N-Ride location, confident that every other car on the road was operated by a driver that would probably blow a .20 on a breathalyzer. There were five other cars in the parking lot and we eyed each other speculatively, trying to ascertain the degree of insanity that placed us all at this location, on this mission.

“Please don’t let anyone be wearing a logo sweatshirt,” I said to myself as I eyed the new motor coach pulled to the side. “Maybe people will think we are activists going on a freedom march, or on a “greening of America” mission.”

My hopes of being incognito were dashed when I turned and saw the brown shapes that approached from out of the darkness. Warm Brown actually, with splints or leather handles. Small Boardwalks, Medium Carry-alls, a retired Gathering with a fruit medley liner.

Baskets were everywhere.

And why not? They were making their way to their birthplace, the motherland, the Mecca: Dresden, Ohio, home to Longaberger Baskets.

And you might ask, how bad is a skating mom life, that you would venture in the early hours of the morn, to a land, far, far away to see the birth of the famed basket? That you would stand in front of a seven-story building shaped like a double handled basket; send that photo to your skating daughter on her cell phone, to have her text back, “Freak”? That you would spend the night at a Comfort Inn in Zanesville, Ohio, home of the renown Zane Grey, and where the smell of oak and mahogany splints lingers in the autumn air? That you would wait in line to have Jerry and Judy Longaberger sign your baskets with almost the same anticipation of Michelle or Kristi?

And I would answer: I needed it. I needed all of it.

The games on the bus, watching “Holiday” on the way home, the diner food, the rest stops, the view of the red-gold leaves in the warm afternoon sun. This, more than any skating year, has been one of joy and triumph, and sadness and loss. The threads of life, and skating life, braid together to form the memory of what we hang onto, of what we use to shape the future.

But sometimes, we really need to let go and do something zany and different.

Sometimes we just need to get on a different bus and just enjoy the ride. I hope you get a chance to do that before the events of Easterns, Mids, and Pacifics unfold.

Just make sure you have a good view of the alarm clock before you start the journey.

Mombo