There’s a party going on right here….

On “My Name Is Earl” last week it had a mother who’s talent for throwing knives has been passed down from generation to generation.

On “Medium” the children share their mother’s ability to see certain things.

It made me wonder what I had passed down my children. The thought of them getting my horrible math skills or my lack of direction scares the hell out of me.

On Friday I took every kid in a 1 mile radius of my house to the roller skating rink. It was there that I realized that the legacy of ‘Red Light. Green Light.’ is being carried on through my oldest daughter, Kara.

When I was a little kid, the only thing that kept me walking that line between ‘good student & bad student’ in school was, ‘Student of the Week’.
If you got the coveted award of being the ‘Student of the Week’, your name was announced at lunch, you got your name in the school news paper AND, if that wasn’t enough, you got to go roller skating.

Where I grew up, roller skating wasn’t something we got to do too much of because only 1 percent of Shingletown had cement. The 1 percent that had cement also had logging trucks going 85 mph. The only place you could roller skate was in a garage, which we didn’t have. We had a barn with a broken down Pinto inside. There was an abandoned swimming pool that we could skate around, but you had to be real careful not to get going too fast and had to learn how to stop REALLY fast or you would go flying off the deep end. This is where my skill in ‘Red Light. Green Light’ started.

I was about 10 years old when I got to go roller skating in a real rink. The smell of Red Ropes and cotton candy was heaven for me.
There isn’t a time when, “Celebration” by Kool and the Gang is played that I don’t feel the wind in my hair as I skated a hundred miles an hour around that skating rink.

Red Light. Green Light is a game where you stand at one end of the rink and the DJ yells, “GREEN LIGHT” and you take off as fast as you can and you must freeze (while skating) when he yells “RED LIGHT”. If you move, you are sent back to the start. You had to make sure you didn’t fall for any of the tricks they threw at you. “GO!” was one that always threw people off. “Raise your hand if you think you’re going to win!” and those kids would raise their hand and since they ‘moved’ they had to go back to the beginning. Not me though.

I couldn’t skate backwards or do those fancy moves, but I could stop on a dime and make sure I was in the position to move again for when he called, “GREEN LIGHT” again. It wasn’t enough that I won ONE of the prizes. I had to be the FIRST one to win.

And I did. I always won.

The past few times we have gone to the rink and the game is played, Kara wins.
It wasn’t until Friday night that I saw her use her skills in full force. She has the same stance, the same determined look on her face, she lays low below the radar and never makes eye contact with the referee. She hops too. The DJ starts saying the words faster and faster and instead of getting up any speed and then making it impossible to stop, she’ll hop. She has come up with her own winning ways to pass on to her daughter.

I actually got nervous for her at one point when it looked like she was going to fail to get the cone. A girl came in and swooped the cone away.

She looked up at me and I knew by the look in her eyes that she was going to get the next cone. I also knew that the girl that stole the cone out from her grips would be getting daggers shot at her for the rest of the night. She gets that from me.

So I have passed on the weirdest trait to my oldest daughter. Now I have to figure out what the other two will get.

Maybe my crazy ‘titty twister’ skill where I can manage to locate the nipple through the shirt on the first grab?