As a kid I lived for Saturdays:  Cap’n Crunch cereal, “Scooby Doo”, “School House Rock”, and then roller skating every afternoon from 2 to 5 at Broadway Skateland.  I got one quarter which I would spend on a “suicide” — all the sodas at the fountain combined into one.  I didn’t even like it; I just thought it was cool to order it.  Colored streamers billowed from the ceiling, as round lights changed colors in time with the beats of disco music.  We all orbited around an elliptical track like tiny planets revolving around the sun.  Presiding over us all was a giant disco ball suspended magically from the center twirling and sending out fragments of light in every direction.  Kids sat on mushroom shaped stools with shagged carpeting to put on their brown rental skates but I had my own.  My Daddy wouldn’t allow me to have black speed skates (he said those were for boys) but I did have white ones which I actually competed in at a local level much like figure skaters do at the Olympics.  Console video games were hot then and if I ever felt like giving up my drink money and using the water fountain I could play a game of Pac-Man.  A quarter was the ticket to everything in the seventies.  They were glory days in a way and I loved the rink as I never did a “club” when I became older.  There is just something so freeing about the wheels … gliding and spinning, that cannot be accomplished in regular shoes.  I have often thought it was like a child’s innocent version of Studio 54.  For so many kids it was an institution, a coming of age arena in an era that predated the internet, texting, and cell phones.  I am so glad our church had a function last year where the kids went skating.  Burk and I could not WAIT to take our little one!  I got her a cool skating outfit just like I had when I was little:  roller skate hair barrettes, a shirt with roller skates on it, and the all-important dark blue jeans rolled up at the bottom with a rhinestone design on the back pockets.  I even wore my School House Rock shirt in silent tribute.  See those skates I’m wearing?  They are the SAME ones I wore all those years ago as a sixth grader (wish I could say the same for my jeans size).  We all got glow necklaces which they did not have when I was little.  I skated backwards as I tried to hold up my then three year old who had never been on skates.  She was in the smallest size they had.  We all left EXHAUSTED.  The local rink in this picture is going to close its doors.  I resolve to go and take my girl back to the rink of my youth and pray it stays open.  It is a living piece of time and I want that for her:  the joy, the freedom, the independence, and the glorious feeling that the world is yours as you skate out on that waxy wooden floor.  American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne once wrote, “Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.”  I want my little one to have some of the same shadows as I … before they skate by.