Paperwork: Funny, where your roller skates can take you

If you’re like me and you let your mind wander, then I bet you’ve been thinking about wheels.

No? Really? Well, stick with me. This wheel thing gets interesting.

Actually, I’m referring to roller skates. That’s how it started. With roller skates and then bicycles.

I was thinking back to the “toys” of my youth. The ones I really enjoyed and meant a lot. (I tend to do this around Christmas time.)

So I locked into this memory of roller skates. The old kind. The metal ones that attached to your shoes.

The process was challenging because I wore sneakers (Google PF Flyers). The skates came with a “key” that was carefully guarded.

(Oh my. Now that song is streaming through my head: “Well, I’ve got a brand new pair of roller skates / You got a brand new key / I think that we should get together, and try them on to see.”)

Anyway, the key was needed to tighten metal clamps on the skates into your toes.

The squeeze on the rubber soles was tight, but never quite enough. So skates tended to slide off, dangling from the ankle strap still attached.

But, hey. It was too much fun to stop. I just put it back on and turned that key even tighter.

So it began. Me thinking about those skates and then the bikes in my life. How precious they were.

Old photos provide evidence that I had other wheelie toys when I was much younger. A tractor with pedals, for example. But I have no lasting memory of them.

But my first two-wheeler is quite memorable. It’s the bike I learned to ride on, and it was much bigger than I was.

I had to push it up next to a tree stump (or something similar) to climb on. And then shove off down a gravel road. Or was it a grassy path to the gravel road?

Details have faded, except for one painful aspect. The bike had no seat. So learning to pedal that beast was challenging.

But I did it. And went on to bike-riding adventures, with streamers flying from handle grips and playing cards attached to the spokes with clothespins.

What a grand noise they made, especially when other boys joined to parade through the neighborhood.

And doing doughnuts on the nearby blacktop when it iced over in the winter.

And flying downhill, both arms outstretched. (I’ve shared that story before. It involved a bone injury.)

Then riding in packs, playing bike tag and peeling out in the gravel, but even better braking into a nice slide.

Boys do love their toys with wheels. Especially when they get older and those wheels flashed whitewalls and shiny, spoked hubcaps.

Big boys needed big wheels to peel out from gravel or better yet, scream out from a street stop.

My toy was a ’65 Mustang. I didn’t use its muscle that much, though.

Although I do remember a city cop catching up to me as I swung into a sliding stop in my gravel parking spot on campus.

Still ... a young man in a cool car knows exactly what the word “cruise” means. (This is a feeling that never ever quite goes away.)

So here I sit, in my den, in a nice desk chair (with wheels). And I am caught up in this chronology of wheels that rolled me through life.

Let’s pause here a moment and say, “God bless the wheel.” Indeed, the greatest invention.

And let’s acknowledge the symbolism, of course. How we roll onward in the great circle of life. How we are all victims and/or winners with that wheel of fortune.

Wheels indeed give us pleasure and make our lives so much easier.

And eventually, they help ease us through pain and our final days. Be it wheelchairs, gurneys or hearses.

Sorry. But I guess that’s how it ends. When you start thinking about roller skates. And wheels.

LONNY CAIN, of Ottawa, is the retired managing editor of The Times. Email him at lonnyjcain@gmail.com.