Around and Around But No Change

During the doldrums we watch too much TV. It is part of the nightly ritual, Linda corrects papers and gets her next day planned, I surf the net and we watch the tube. One of the shows we watch on occasion is called Cold Case. The premise of this police drama includes a division of detectives that take cases that have not been solved, Cold Cases, and they follow old leads, interview people and eventually solve the case. At the end of the show they always show a box of evidence for the case being placed on a shelf with a big CLOSED stamped on it.

The one part of the show that I really enjoy is the morphing of the characters involved in the case between the age that the event took place and the present time, this takes place many times as the detectives investigate. Throughout the show main characters change from old to young as each piece of evidence is collected.

Last week I had a Cold Case moment. No I was not involved with a police case, nothing like that! I went roller skating at the local roller rink. The entire event seamed strangely similar to this television drama, in the sense that as I entered the place I recognized the manager as the same person that was there about fifteen years ago when we had college skate nights at the rink.

He looked much older, but I clearly remember how he looked as a younger man. Also, when I entered the food court I recognized the woman running the concessions area as one of the roller groupies fifteen years ago. She was older just like the manager. The two were obviously partners at the rink; it looked like they might even have been married. My Cold Case point was that the roller cad had not changed much if fifteen years and in my mind, I could morph back to the days when these two people were young skaters starting out running the roller rink, the manager a young stud skater and the woman the young skate rink beauty flirting with the boys.

There were several other odd things I notices about this never changing venue. The music was the same! There were newer songs playing, but the bulk of the songs were the same popular tunes I had skated to. Some of the music was remixed into rap or hiphop to satisfy the younger crowd’s tastes. With each song I could close my eyes and see how this place was when we first did student programming here.

The people never change in a skate rink. Back when we first laced up the skates, there were the roller groupies, both male and female. Fifteen years ago they had tight pants with bell bottoms and a halter tops for the girls, flowered puffy shirts for the guys. Today it’s tight pants, girls with Spaghetti straps, guys with Hurley t-shirts and both with some form of tattoo on their shoulders. They get on the floor and strut their stuff dancing, cross stepping, and speeding around; their only intention was to impress. Also in the mix were the older dance skaters and the hippy tie-die folks; all out to relax and enjoy the movement and the music. Young kids with their parents and grandparents all mixed into the circular rhythmic dance. Every type of person, and only their clothing had changed.

Sitting back that night I saw that there was really no difference between then and now. They have inline skates now, but for the most part if you had a video of an average night fifteen years ago, and one from last Wednesday, you could morph between the two decades with very little significant changes. That’s good to know.