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Nostalgia January 2015

Roller Skates: Memories, Wall Art, and Life Lessons

By Marti Healy

I don’t remember a specific day when I refused to put on my skates – to forsake the few moments of joy and victory for the safety of flat shoes on firm ground. Perhaps such sacrifices come to us on the silent waves of age, out of the shadows of experience. I don’t know when it happened, but I’m sorry it did.

“Now, where did I put my roller skates?” I calmly asked the dog. Speaking out loud to the dog is nothing new or out of the ordinary for me. But as soon as I heard this particular question coming out of my mouth, I had to laugh. This was not a sentence I would have expected to hear myself saying anymore.

I had come across the now wayward skates, just days earlier, hanging in the back of a closet. I had dragged them out covered with dust as thick as memories. Lovingly, I had rinsed them clean and oiled the wheels and left them to dry in the sun.

I discovered that I still own two pairs of roller skates. One pair is the shoe kind – white leather with blue and red stripes on them, they have hard plastic wheels and lace-up tops and are really quite spiffy looking. The other pair – the pair I was looking for and interrogating the dog about – is much older and infinitely more beloved.

These old skates are made of metal, heavy and prone to rust when left out in the rain. Their solid metal wheels could whack the heck out of your shins if you went down wrong. They needed a very special metal “key” to tighten the toe grips, designed to clamp onto the soles of hefty Buster Browns or saddle shoes.

The key was either worn on a string around your neck (swinging viciously into your face when you whirled too fast), or it was perpetually lost, and you had to borrow your sister’s key (a terrible imposition for some reason). And around the ankles, cushioned only by your woefully ineffective socks, fat leather straps fastened into square metal buckles.

I can still hear the sound of roller skate wheels clacking across the cracks of sidewalks. And I can still remember the feeling of helplessness – right before you found your balance ... and the joy of learning how to turn a corner and how to stop with your toe ... and the challenge of finding a spot of grass just in time – before you went down for a landing.

I can also vividly recall the exhilarating terror of being on the end of the line when playing “crack the whip” – flying, faster and faster, wind in your face, trees and grass and houses speeding past, knowing the crash would come – but oh, what a thrill, before it did!

These were the days long before safety pads and helmets, of course. But, surprisingly, I’ve discovered that these were also the days before my own metaphorical “protective gear.” I wonder just when the fear of falling began to outweigh the thrill of the ride. It must have been gradual. I don’t remember a specific day when I refused to put on my skates – to forsake the few moments of joy and victory for the safety of flat shoes on firm ground. Perhaps such sacrifices come to us on the silent waves of age, out of the shadows of experience. I don’t know when it happened, but I’m sorry it did.

Perhaps it’s why finding the skates filled me with such unexpected delight. Perhaps by finding them I would find a way back to taking chances, a way to focus on the wind instead of the steepness of the hill.

Like most childhood memories, of course, parts of it are worn away. In this case, the leather straps of the skates are dried and stiff and broken. And, this time, I refuse to accept that they may be yet another metaphor for who I have become.

And so, this morning, I took my skates to the local shoe repair shop and heard another question coming out of my mouth that I never expected to be saying: “Can you fix my roller skates?”

Perhaps I will actually hear once again the clack-clack of metal wheels over sidewalk cracks and experience the mysterious joy of insecurity. But I suspect it is more likely that I will simply be content with hanging the skates on a wall as art and remembrance – as a visual, ever-present reminder to always enjoy the ride.

 

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