Last Sunday in Murfreesboro I roller skated for hours in the hot mid-afternoon sun. After a bit of that, I was hungry – and thirsty. Being a holiday weekend, not much in the way of eateries was open in the historic downtown area of Murfreesboro, where I was happily tucked away with no car.

I rolled up to the square. Sadly, no coffee shops open. In fact, nothing open at all. I was headed back home when I noticed that B. McNeel’s was open for 20 more minutes. This restaurant is elegant; housed in a historic building just a block off the square. This establishment reminds me of something one might see adorned with magnolia blossoms and featured in Southern Living Magazine, it’s that beautiful on the inside.

I walked up the stairs to the front door on my skate stoppers and a smiling hostess opened the door for me.

“Can I eat in here?” I asked. The hostess kind of gave me a funny look. I pointed to my skates. “I don’t want to mess up your hardwoods.”

“I’ll go ask my manager,” she said.

I waited, sweating outside no more than thirty seconds before the front door was flung open yet again by another smiling face. It was Barbara herself, the owner of the restaurant.

“Get in here, girl!” she said, laughing. “Just don’t fall.”

I did have to catch my balance momentarily as I rolled across those slick, polished hardwood floors. The menu at B. McNeel’s is simple for Sunday brunch. There’s a buffet with everything you can imagine, but I didn’t want to get out of my seat or walk up to the buffet line in my socked feet amongst all the families who were sporting their Sunday finery.

My waitress came to get my drink order and informed me that Barbara was taking care of my tab! I wanted something special and made-to-order and insisted that I pay. “No,” the waitress repeated. “It’s on us.”

“Thank you! How nice!” I said. “I’m a guest in this town!”

I ordered the huevos rancheros and was very pleasantly surprised by this Southern restaurant’s rendition of my favorite Latin breakfast. The refried beans were whole beans, not refried bean paste. And the sauce! Oh the sauce! It was just spicy enough and very dark reddish brown, full of speckles of peppers and herbs and goodness and full of flavor too. I’m sure they make it in the kitchen from scratch.

The restaurant is full of dappled light from the long windows and has a great feel in general. I indeed felt as though I stepped into a magazine. And then, just when I thought the experience couldn’t get any better, Lyle Lovett’s voice pumped through the loudspeaker. My favorite song was playing.

My little getaway abode over the 4th of July weekend turned out to be in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. A friend of mine was out of town and graciously offered her apartment to me.

Murfreesboro was the first place I lived solo. I was 17 years old and rented part of an historic house in the antebellum, but kinda run-down part of town. The place my friend offered was three blocks away from my old house! It was so exciting to be in that part of the world again. I popped on my roller skates and skated through the streets, past all those crumbling and gorgeous pre Civil War homes.

The thing I love most about that part of town are all the carriage stones. Just about every front yard has an old rock or concrete slab in front. The carriages would drop the ladies off at the stone step. Ah! Such elegant days . . . The friend’s home I stayed at has three in the yard. I told her that the yard must’ve been some odd bus stop for carriages.

Not a lot has changed in that neighborhood. The Kwik Stop is still up the street and there’s still about 50 brands of cigarettes I’ve never heard of in my life being sold there from cardboard barrels – probably so kids can steal ‘em easier. They also have an impressive collection of knives and swords in prominent display over a new fancy ice cream cooler. Whoa. All this is clever marketing, but I’m not sure I approve.

Junior’s Foodland is still down the street, which thrills me to no end! In a world where corporations are trying to run every last little guy out of business, it was sheer joy to walk into that tiny little grocery store . . . you know the kind. The kind that smell like a tiny grocery store because they’ve got a butcher shop in the back. Junior’s Foodland also specializes in fresh fried chicken. I was happy to see chicken wings smashed into the black asphalt of the parking lot. Again, some things, thankfully, never change.

I skated past MTSU (Middle Tn State University). I took part of one class there once. The day I was supposed to pith a live frog for Biology class, I walked out the door, never to return. I rolled in figure 8′s in the parking lot of The Boro Bar and Grill, the only first bar I’ve ever been kicked out of. I skated up to Oakland’s Mansion, which sits at the end of my old street and read about Nathan Bedford Forrest’s attack on the Union army back in 1863. (Gosh, I don’t even think I knew about that when I lived there . . . !)

I rolled past my old place enough times that I eventually ran into the older dude who lives there now. He let me poke my head inside his part of the crumbling post Civil War mansion. The house itself is older and more dilapidated than when I lived there, but this guy takes much better care of the apartment than I did when I was a 17 year old kid living there alone. The peeled wallpaper has been patched and fixed. The horrific paint job I once gave to the grandiose 90 degree staircase has been amended. The old electric heater is the same.

The only thing that’s missing is the carriage stone that used to sit out front.

Roller skating the winding, woodsy bike path meandering for miles along the Congaree River in Columbia, South Carolina yesterday was very much like a metaphor for my life lately.

I’d heard that the bike path along the river was perfect for roller skating. Up until hearing about the river walk, I was trying to find a good empty lot or parking garage, but all the locals said, “Oh, check out river walk . . . ”

Either no one in South Carolina roller skates very much or they are hard-core skaters with much more courage than I. I’m thinking that it’s the former that’s the case because yesterday was a typical thriving Sunday afternoon in the park and while there were walking couples and puppies galore, I only saw one roller blader and a handful of cyclists. As the lone roller skater, the looks I received told me that they don’t see this kind o’ thing around these here parts too often.

I may be an avid roller skater, but I’m not all too athletic with it. I do not perform tricks. I’m not that great at stopping on a dime. I’m an artist adventurer, not an athletic adventurer.

Upon arrival, I parked the car in the gravel lot across the street and wandered down the grassy hill to the river walk in my socked feet, carrying the skates. I needed to suss the place before beginning. My definition of flat is sea level. Again, I thought I’d ask a local.

A lady pushing one of those high tech speed racer baby carts jogged past. “Is the path very hilly?” I asked, brandishing my skates. “Or flat?”

“Oh, it’s pretty flat,” the lady quickly replied. “You should be OK.”

Now, if she would have told me the truth, which is that the path curves and takes sharp twists and is probably too hilly for a roller skater, then I probably would have missed out on this adventure. As it is, I rolled right into the middle of the woods, literally. And while it was sticky and sometimes scary and fraught with snarls along the way, I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.

I had to really be mindful on this tree-lined path, I knew right away because the sidewalk was littered with small sticks and pods of every variety and there were lots of people walking with dogs and babies. And I could see the path zig-zag and curve down hill, but the lady with the carriage after all, did say it was “pretty flat” so I kept thinking that just around the next bend, everything would straighten out.

It never did, but I was committed to my adventure by now, so I was rollin’ with it, literally. The river is wide and shallow, full of large flat sandstone rocks. There were people everywhere playing in and along the river and path, some fishing, some wading, some reading, some chatting at picnic tables with their families. I love hearing snippets of conversation as I roll past people. One girl squealed, “Oh mother, don’t tell me that you really believe that your son has a perverted interest in children!” Yep, I thought, I’m definitely in South Carolina.

I was especially happy to be rolling through such a different kind of environment: the humid air full of the woodsy smells of leaves and flower blossoms. I’ve rolled through the gritty streets of Chicago and I hit the beach path in Venice every day that I can, but to be cruising past big trees was a new and exhilarating feeling – but I knew I didn’t have the luxury of just innocently blazing through this place. I had to be on guard, because every time I gazed at the river, a little rock or twig would remind me that I was in uncharted territory. Argh! Not to mention that twist in the path up ahead and – eek! – the hill going down, down, down to a wooden plank walkway that twisted before me with no end in sight . . . . !

Br-u-u-ump! Br-u-u-ump! Br-u-u-ump! My teeth chattered and people could hear me coming and cleared the way as I rolled downhill and onto the bridge, fully into a secluded forest setting. Momentarily I thought about turning around, but dammit, I was here, so I was determined to see where this path ended. The concrete path eventually opened back up, only to be oft-punctuated with wooden plank bridges.

In life, sometimes we see bumps along the way, and that little voice trips inside our heads, warning us with a sense of foreboding. At one point, as I rolled uphill and onto another bridge, I noticed the smallest little ramp, maybe an inch in height connecting the planks and sidewalk and that little voice said, “Watch out for that ramp on the way back . . . .

The path ended in another county in a completely different town. Someone buried their pet at the end of the path, making a little grave with flowers for a memorial and a headstone that read, “Fluffy – Gone but not forgotten.”

On the way back, I remembered the ramp and I knew when I was getting close. By this time, I’d developed a certain comfort zone with the wooden planks, and it felt as though I wasn’t able to catch much speed while chattering across. My thoughts were absorbed by the upcoming little ramp, and I completely forgot the hill leading down to it – that is, until I was in mid-hill and I realized I was going waaaay too fast to properly navigate both the little ramp and the immediate curving concrete just past it.

I knew I was about to eat shit. “Farfegnuggin!” I screamed as I hit the concrete. It was that or jettison myself into the river rocks about ten feet off the veering path.

I sat up. I could move my arms. I could move my legs. Didn’t hit my face. Whew! I landed on my knee and elbow, losing skin on both . . . and I waited for the hurt, but it never came. The sting felt strangely OK, good even. The song lyrics came to my head, “When everything feels like the movies, yeah you bleed just to know you’re alive . . .”

An older lady came running up to me as I reached for my glasses, which had landed several feet away. “Are you OK?” she asked. And then in what could only be called true Southern hospitality, she exclaimed, “I am not leaving here til you get up!”

I got up, shaken, but kept going, this time, more wary and more slowly and even at times taking the skates off and walking. As I neared the parking lot, I thought about getting in the car and just going home, but that’s when I realized I still had the whole upper part of the path to explore. And that’s exactly what I did, bloody strawberry on elbow, sore body and all. I don’t know when I’ll be back on the Congaree, so I had to see as much of it as possible while it was in front of me!

In an earlier post today, I made reference to a saxophone. That’s because I was thinking about this saxophone player I know from around the Venice ‘hood who always rides his skateboard barefoot while playing his sax. He cruises through town bringing a sense of peace with him. And sometimes you can be out near the beach in the twilight when the cold and the fog and the wind kicks up enough to send you home . . . and then from the mist, you hear the peal of a saxophone moving through the boardwalk. I hadn’t seen him in probably a year or more.

Today is sunshiney and windy. I just got back from a quick skate and I’m rolling down the boardwalk, the wind pushing me fast. I look up into the people ahead and my eyes rest on a glint of sun coming off of a stationary . . . saxophone! No way . . . I’m thinking, and grind my stopper into the cement to slow down and sure enough, it’s my old friend the barefoot skateboarding saxophone player who I’d just been thinking of today!

I’m to that point in my life when, sometimes, I have camel-toe and I don’t really care.

It’s my roller skating outfit – strechy sexy matching workout pants and jacket – with racing stripes on the side of the pants. It’s tight, in all the right places. The orange and brown of the suit match my orange and brown skates. The pants pull up in just the right spot, but not too far. This is no exaggerated cameltopia happening. It’s subtle. It’s sexy.

The other day I wore the roller skating suit to the grocery store (without the skates). As I push my cart down the aisle, I turn my head and spy a gentleman in his mid-40′s or so totally checking me out. And I catch his glance and smile and kind of chuckle. He gives me a rather pleasant look that seems to say, “Thank you, lady, thank you for wearing that outfit to the grocery store.”

No problem! So, you see, really I am performing a public service while wearing this outfit – skating the boardwalk or not. Note – it’s difficult for me to get pix of this, but I did have a photoshoot with a friend today and I think we may have gotten it, so look for the upcoming shots. I just couldn’t keep it, you know, the camel toe, to myself.