A local artist, Janet Orselli makes wonderful assemblage art out of odds and end, old stuff and bits and bobs. One of my favorite pieces is this old roller skate with a shoe last and violin bow attached - all to make a thoughtful piece of art.
When I was a child we actually wore these metal skates. They attached to our shoes with clamps on the sides. We used our skate key to tighten the skates to our feet. It was not the most perfect of designs. The skates often came loose and in the middle of a glide the skate would end up dangling from our feet - and we usually viewed this from the sitting down position, having been dumped on our rear ends!
There were no sidewalks where I lived -- so we would take our skates out onto the black tar streets and try, not too successfully, to gracefully skate up and down. One year my father began to add a room to our house. The foundation was a cement slab and we thought we were in heaven as we glided across the smooth cement. We were quite disappointed when the walls started going up and we were banned from the 'construction' site.
For a couple of years my skate key hung around my neck -- a talisman of this wonderful adventure in movement. Thanks to Janet for bringing back these long ago memories.
"... to be a child, to be a child! To have the roads and the days all stretching out forward and upward and away." - Gary Jennings
