ALL SKATE: True Stories from Middle Life is a series of musings from one mid-life woman, wife, and mother on what it means to grow old in a country obsessed with TikTok, Instagram influencers, and that creepy Elon Musk and his Mars-bound robots.
“What will you do / with your one wild and precious life?” the poet Mary Oliver asked, and the answer here is “everything.”
In this poignant and laugh-out-loud series of reflections, Jakiela invites readers into her world: from the heartbreak and hilarity of grade-school crushes to pandemic roller-skating fiascos; from the dreaded anticipation of bathing suit season to the joyful embrace of flawed and fragile bodies. She takes on the challenges of Swedish death-cleaning with wit and delves into the smallest, most profound moments of human connection—testifying to the eternal power of humor, love, and kindness.
What People are Saying About ALL SKATE:
“Tough, searching and funny, these intimate essays find hope even during the worst tribulations of middle age. Lori Jakiela is a fearless writer, trying to make sense of her life and losses while celebrating the world and the people she loves with an indomitable wonder. All Skate is that rare miracle—a book that gives you courage.’ —Stewart O’Nan, author of Last Night at the Lobster and Emily, Alone
“In All Skate: True Stories from Middle Life, Lori Jakiela delivers another collection of essays brimming with what readers have come to love about her work: a little heartbreak, a lot of humor, and the hard working hands of a writer who always knows exactly where to draw a reader’s attention. Jakiela does the brilliant work of connecting everything from Buddhism to roller skating to Jimmy Carter, mastectomies, butterflies, bullies, bikinis, and working-class bars. She writes essays like the airplanes she describes from her time as a flight attendant. They’re full of heavy baggage and anxious characters, but they glide like weightless miracles, making readers forget how much technical skill it takes to build and fly each of these beautiful machines. —Sarah Shotland, author of Junkette
“With Lori Jakiela you get a generous wit, a completely unique sensibility, and a playful weaving of disparate subjects that in her hands become inevitably connected. This is a writer who holds a bright (and often funny) lantern up to darkness she feels is on its way, and darkness that has already swept through her life in the form of loss. Who but Jakiela would leave the lights on in their dead mother’s house so they could drive by and imagine she was still inside watching Golden Girls? Deep love of brilliantly drawn parents, children, students, friends, and husband permeate this collection, as does Jakiela’s sharp eye on gender, and on how class operates in the world of literary culture. Once again, Jakiela resists pretension while holding onto roots, onto home, onto the ties that bind and give our lives meaning.” —Jane McCafferty, author of First You Try Everything and The Sea Lion Who Saved the Boy Who Jumped From the Golden Gate
“Lori Jakiela reminds me of those fearless street performers who toss lighted torches in the air and always, miraculously, catch them on the way down. Jakiela’s flaming torches are hard, funny truths about herself, about us, and about the nation as it burns down to ashes.” —Susan Zakin, author of In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster and founding editor, Journal of the Plague Years
ALL SKATE: True Stories from Middle Life will resonate with anyone who has ever wondered what comes next and how to face it with humor, love, and strength. Don’t miss this masterful new release from Lori Jakiela, available March 2025.
Don’t miss out: Lori will be launching All Skate at Stay Gold Books on Friday, March 14th!
About the Author: Lori Jakiela is the author of seven books, most recently a memoir, They Write Your Name on a Grain of Rice: On Cancer, Love, and Living Even So (Atticus Books). Another memoir, Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe (Autumn House Press), received the Saroyan Prize for International Literature from Stanford University. Lori’s essay collection, Portrait of the Artist as a Bingo Worker: On Work and the Writing Life (Bottom Dog Press), has been adopted as a common text at Westmoreland Community College for the past two years. Many of the essays in All Skate: True Stories from Mid-Life have been published in places like Pittsburgh Magazine, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Washington Post, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Journal of the Plague Years, Pulse, and more. Lori’s other work has appeared in The New York Times/Modern Love column, The Chicago Tribune, Brevity/Creative Nonfiction, Full Grown People, The Rumpus, and more. Her author website is http://lorijakiela.net.
The Art of The Take-Off
My favorite thing about flying is take-off. I love the rev of the engines, the feel of throttling down a runway at 600 miles an hour. The miracle of that. I love the way the landing gear lifts and locks intoplace—slam dunk, no turning back. I love the magic- carpet whoosh of air beneath my feet. I was a flight attendant for years, trained to pay attention to every sound and motion—the whir of wing flaps, the thrum of the hydraulics, the way ascent feels, the steep smooth climb, the gravity-defying beauty of that. I loved and still love every impossible thing about flight. I love the way somethingso heavy can become, in an instant, seemingly weightless. If something so huge can go airborne with the weight of all those human hearts wrapped up inside, anything is possible.
The Art of The Carry On
A grown man took a swing at me in the Tampa airport. It was 5 a.m. I know it was 5 a.m. because I remember sneaking coffee, against my airline’s regulations, which I’d hidden behind the ticketing podium.
It’s hard to forget a grown man taking a swing, especially when it comes before noon.
I was a flight attendant, taking tickets and saying the usual, “Hi, welcome aboard,” when this man approached with his suitcase. He didn’t look like the kind of guy who’d take a swing. He was dressed in a tan business suit. He was only moderately tan. Sure, he used a lot of hair gel, but this was Tampa, not West Palm, and there’s a difference.
***
An aside:
Flights between my base, New York City, and West Palm are called Miracle Flights. When it’s time for boarding, wheelchairs line up like taxis at an airport cab stand. People who need extra time for boarding—parents with small children, famous actors who don’t want a fuss, people in wheelchairs—get to board first.
We call these passengers pre-boards.
Pre-board, boarding before you board, doesn’t make any more sense than any other airline catch words and phrases—rough air for turbulence, trip for hijacking, and of course, deplane.
If deplane means to disembark, then plane would mean boarding, right? Let’s all plane now.
Ready, set, plane!
“De plane! De plane!” Herve Villechaize, the diminutive actor who preferred to be called a midget and who played Tattoo on the classic 1980’s TV show Fantasy Island, would shout at the beginning of every episode.
“De plane! De plane!” Herve Villechaize shouted in commercials for Dunkin’ Donuts after he was fired in 1983 during Fantasy Island’s final season.
Herve Villechaize was fired for demanding equal pay with his co-star Ricardo Montalban and for harassing and propositioning women on set. The sign on Herve Villechaize’s dressing room door read, “Sex Instructor–First Lesson Free.”
Back then, pre-Me Too, reporters called the sign cheeky. They called it almost cute.
***
When I was first hired by my airline, the company store sold t-shirts that read: “Marry Me. Fly Free.” The t-shirts were a hot item, always sold out, such were the sensibilities of America in the 1990s.
Later, I’d use the t-shirt slogan on my soon-to-be husband, though he wouldn’t bite. His idea of dream travel–Pittsburgh to Ocean City, Maryland. Ocean City, Maryland to Pitts- burgh. There are noflights between Pittsburgh and Ocean City, Maryland. It’s a seven-hour drive, more or less, depending on stops at Wawa. Wawa has a great meatball sub. Wawa has clean bathrooms. The coffee, as convenience-store coffee goes, isn’t terrible. My would-be husband loved Wawa, but he hated to fly. He still does. He isn’t much for travel. We got married anyway.
And I’ll be happy here and happy / there full / of tea and tears.
That’s the poet Frank O’Hara, beloved on this earth. Two decades in, my husband and I are still married, and we both still read Frank O’Hara, who loved to travel, who loved the ocean, who also said:
I am really a woodcarver / and my words are love.
***
But back to pre-boards, a word Frank O’Hara would love I think, a word that maybe should be translated to pre-planes in airline semantics.
Pre-boards get the best overhead bin space. Pre-boards get first dibs on flight attendant call buttons, which they press again and again, hoping for a pre-flight water or juice or a nice Bloody Mary, extra spicy.
I have to take a pill, doll. I’m dying here, doll. (Makes choking sounds, hands around throat.) Be a doll, doll. Slip me a little some- thing extra, know what I’m saying?
Later comes the miracle:
By the time those flights land in West Palm, nearly all the pre- boards’ ailments are—praise be!—healed. The passengers who just a few hours ago couldn’t walk a jetway deplane like gymnasts, their pockets and carry-ons stuffed with vodka minis and sleeves of Biscoff cookies they snatched from the beverage cart, while a fleet of wheelchairs—pre-ordered by the pre-boards— stand by, empty, waiting.
***
As for the New York-Tampa flights, those are usually okay.
***
When people say Florida Man, they should have to say which Florida, which who, which where, which why and which how. It’s all in the details, but these recent headlines keep going general on Florida while mixing in the specifics of the crime:
- Florida Man Attacked by Squirrel During Selfie with Squirrel
- Florida Man in “No, Seriously, I Have Drugs” T-Shirt Arrested for Possession of Drugs
- Florida Man Suspected of Using Private Plane to Draw Giant Radar Penis
- Florida Man with Handlebar Mustache Assaults Woman on Plane, Starts Fight With Several Passengers, Yells at Police to Tase Him “And You’ll See What Happens,” Gets Tased 10 Times
As for my Tampa Florida Man, he seemed mostly normal, other than the suitcase he wanted to bring onboard. The suitcase was huge and heavy, with glittery ribbons tied to the handle to make it easy to find in the stew of humanity that is baggage claim.
The ribbons meant my Florida Man had flown enough to know the power of glittery ribbons. The ribbons meant he feared los- ing his suitcase. The ribbons meant he could find what was his before it vanished.
***
Once years ago, I took a bus from Pittsburgh to Vermont. Some- how, during my switch from one bus to another, my suitcase was lost. I spent half a week in Vermont at a pinky-up writer’s conference in my bus-appropriate, non-pinky-up MTV Rocks sweatpants, Ramones t-shirt, and borrowed socks.
It seemed weird that Greyhound could lose a suitcase, a bus being a simple mode of ground transportation, different from flying, definitely less complicated, a matter of class, privilege, or just gravity maybe.
“Now everyone can fly the flying bus,” senior flight attendants, who previously worked for luxurious but defunct airlines like Pan Am and reminisced about the years when flying was an exclusive, glamorous, white-gloves-and-caviar affair, said.
They flapped their hands like wings and sighed their pigeon sighs.
When I was flying, senior flight attendants worked First class or Business class. Coach class, mostly called Coach, no class attached, was for newbies like me.
“To the back with you,” senior flight attendants would say, as if working in coach was a punishment or a rite of passage, both. They’d flap their hand-wings then, too.
***
In Vermont, at that writer’s conference, I felt ashamed. I didn’t have money to fly, so I took a bus, 17-plus hours. I’d been accept- ed to the conference on a scholarship that was, in part, based on the fact that I had no money. I looked a mess, partly because of that luggage problem and my lack of fancy pinky-up clothes, but it was more than that. Like what had happened to my lug- gage was a metaphor. Like I, a working-class kid from rust-belt Pittsburgh, had landed, an alien, in the country of Ben & Jerry, Robert Frost, tennis whites, prize-winning cows, and literature with a capital “L.”
Losing my luggage meant losing things that might have allowed me to blend in: my carefully curated writer clothes (black turtlenecks, black jeans, black everything), red lipstick, scuffed Doc Martens, some hair gel even—not Florida level, but still.
Without my luggage, I felt vulnerable, exposed. A fraud.
***
“A writer’s job is to get naked, to hide nothing, to look away from nothing, to not blink, to not be embarrassed or ashamed,” the great grit-lit Florida writer Harry Crews said.
But Harry Crews was a regular on “The Tonight Show.” Harry Crews wrote what some people, including me, say is the greatest memoir of the 20th century—Childhood: Biography of a Place. Harry Crews cut his hair into a mohawk. He had many tat- toos. One tattoo said, “How do you like your blue-eyed boy Mr. Death?”
Harry Crews, in a series of interviews called Getting Naked with Harry Crews, said,“So you get a tattoo like this and a ’do like this, and wear a shirt where the tattoo shows, and you walk into a room of people and feel the animosity, the disapproval, the how-dare-you. You can feel it coming off them like heat off a stove. And the thing I want to ask them is, how have I deserved this, what have I done that so offends you?”
***
“Sir,” I said to the Tampa man with the huge suitcase, “I can check that for you. That way, you can relax and you won’t have to worry about finding space on board.”
The man looked at me as if I’d offered to gate-check his only child. He looked at me as if I’d told the worst-ever Florida Man joke.
“I’m happy to help,” I said and gave him my best Welcome Aboard smile. This probably made things between us worse.
***
The airline I worked for had, still has, an infamous acronym: Don’t Expect Your Luggage to Arrive. The acronym’s tricky, like all acronyms maybe, but easy to figure out if you try, and funny only if it doesn’t apply to you and your bags.
This acronym is especially not helpful when dealing with passengers determined to board with their luggage and whatever’s inside.
***
The Tampa man’s suitcase may have been filled with pork bellies. It could have held a prize-winning pig. This was around Christmas. You’d be surprised how many people pack hams in their carry-ons around Christmastime and treat said hams like kilos of cocaine, something illicit and essential and valuable beyond reason.
Or his bag could have been filled with more suits that he’d need to impress the people he was headed to meet.
Maybe he needed the suits for a funeral.
Or maybe, like another man on another flight, his bag held something more precious and unpredictable than any of that.
That man came into the galley. He pointed to an apple I’d brought for lunch. He said, “I thought there wasn’t any food on this flight.”
I said, “I brought that from home.”
He said, “Huh. Really,” and kept staring at the apple.
Ravenous, or just spiteful, angry, entitled, who knows. People pay a lot of money to fly. They pay a lot of money to be denied a snack or a drink or even a terrible meal featuring a stale breadstick and a chicken breast with fake grill marks.
Something, they might as well say, just give us something to make this all feel worth it.
About the apple, I said, reluctant, my voice all as-if and you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me,“ Well, you can have it. If you want.”
I thought he’d pass on the apple, because really, who eats another person’s apple? I had a 12-hour day ahead, no time for real food, and so the apple mattered in a way it wouldn’t have otherwise. Butthe man didn’t pass. He grabbed the apple and bit. And bit. And bit.
He seemed so hungry, like he’d been lost on a deserted island and our plane picked him up and this apple was the first real food he’d seen in who knows. Apple juice ran down his chin. He swiped it with his shirt sleeve. I handed him a bev nap, proper placement even, the airline logo facing out, such is the training of a flight attendant.
Everything my airline taught—proper bev nap placement, the pronunciation of cheeses in first-class, how to handle a hijacking or worse—was essential to my job. Everything my airline taught was delivered with the same level of intensity. Would you like a beverage? Would you like ice? How about some oxygen? Can I offer you a little CPR?
“Everything matters when you think nothing matters,” my in- flight instructor said, a catchphrase. I’m still not sure what she meant, but she said it with such heart it seemed, still seems, important, a life lesson maybe.
“Would you like some pretzels?” I asked the man who gnawed my apple to a brown nub.“We have a stash up front.”
The man nodded. He said he didn’t have time to eat before. He said he hadn’t been eating much lately and now, who knows why, he was starving.
“I hate flying,” he said, “but my mother wanted me to bring her home.”
He blotted the apple juice off his chin. His eyes teared up. I handed him another bev nap. Then another.
You never really know what’s happened to a person. You never know what’s in someone else’s heart, the baggage they carry. In this man’s case—his mother’s ashes.
In this man’s case—grief that outweighed his fear of flying.
***
“Sir,” I said to the Tampa man with the oversized bag filled with what-not, “I’ll just need to check and weigh your bag and make sure it will fit on board.”
And that’s when he swung.
He didn’t say anything. He just tried to roundhouse me.
I ducked, its own kind of miracle, one of the few things my in- flight instructor never taught me. My morning reflexes are pretty much sloth-in-a-tar-pit, but maybe, through some airline-train- ing-infused intuition, I felt the punch coming.
***
My Tampa man was ranting when airport security took him away. He called me the kinds of names that are hard to hear, es- pecially at 5 a.m., especially from a stranger, especially when the words echo down a lush tropical concourse and everyone turns to stare.
Maybe terrible things happened to him earlier. Maybe he stood in a long line at ticketing. Maybe he was frisked by the TSA. Maybe he paid $6 for a stale airport cookie. Maybe he was carrying the ashes of someone he loved. Maybe he was headed some- where he didn’t belong and was nervous about it.
“Don’t get too big for your britches,” my mother used to say when she thought I was aspiring to be uppity and overstepping my roots.
She wanted to protect me, I think. Maybe. Maybe not. “Stay in your lane.” My mother said that, too.
But this is about the Florida man who took a swing at me.
I know only one thing for sure: this man did not want to be separated from his bag.
Whatever was in there was so important to him that he’d risk anything.
***
Attachment to material possessions, the Buddhists say, is an obstacle to enlightenment. Attachment to material possessions, the Buddhists say, is a detour from one’s authentic self. Attachment to material possessions, the Buddhists say, detours one’s spiritual journey.
Maybe at that pinky-up conference all those years ago, I was forced by fate or Greyhound to be my authentic self, no costume to hide behind. I was in my 20s, though, vulnerable as a bruise, trying to become whatever I’d become. I would have loved to punch whoever lost my luggage and left me exposed like that, with nothing more than the words I’d write, none of which were very good.
Oh, boo hoo, Harry Crews would say.
“Strip it down!” Harry Crews said, “Let’s get down to where the blood is, the bone is. Instead of hiding it with clothes and all kinds of other stuff, luxury!”
I believe that. I hold onto beautiful madman Harry’s words beyond reason. I have no idea what the man in Tampa all those years ago believed or needed or wanted to hold onto beyond rea- son. I’m older now and try to be gentle, more understanding. I fail daily.
Some Tuesdays, I go to the basement of a library in Oakmont, Pennsylvania, where three lovely Tibetan monks in saffron robes lead a community meditation. We meditate on the difference between loving kindness and love. One is selfless, one is not.
During our meditations, we wish everyone healthy. We wish everyone peaceful.
We wish everyone, including ourselves, well.
***
Still.
Who takes a swing at someone at 5 a.m.?
I wonder if Tampa guy remembers and feels bad about things. I wonder how big his fine was or if he was put on a no-fly list or if he got off with a warning about how it’s wrong to punch a flight attendant, especially before noon, especially before said flight attendant had enough coffee to fuel a punch back.
This was the 1990s, after all.
The world was less scary and more forgiving then.
***
Still. Tampa guy?
Fuck that guy.
This excerpt is published here courtesy of the author and should not be reprinted without permission.
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