Blog: I've Got a Brand New Pair of Roller Skates

Many Roseville elementary schools celebrate Grandparents' Day, and I was thrilled when I received an invitation from my 8-year-old grandson, to share that special time with him.

Grandparents' Day is an annual tradition filled with laughter, music and memories. The children spend months collecting photographs for their family tree and learning songs such as “When I'm Sixty-Four.”

Each grandparent is asked to bring an item from their childhood that the children might not recognize. I brought one of my most prized possessions. It had remained hidden for years in the back of a kitchen drawer in the house I grew up in. I was overjoyed when I found that simple icon of my childhood, many years later, in the same place I had left it. 

It was my skate key.

When I was a young girl in the 1960s, almost every child owned a pair of adjustable metal roller skates.

In those days, roller skates were clamped directly to the shoes and secured around the ankle by a leather strap. The clamps were tightened around the toes of the shoes by using— you guessed it—a skate key. Unfortunately, no matter how tightly the skates were secured, within minutes of starting out, the clamps loosened, a skate slipped off, and the skater took a tumble—left behind with two skinned knees and a skate dangling from an ankle.

When the newness of the skates wore off, they were dismantled and the wheels were nailed to the front and back of a two by four. A wooden fruit crate was attached to the front of the plank along with two leftover scraps of wood for handles. We were now ready to race around the block a few hundred more times on our makeshift scooters.

The students in my grandson's class were perplexed by the whole idea of metal skates and makeshift scooters. While I tried to explain a skate key in my pocket, many of them carried a cell phone in theirs.

I learned something important during that Grandparents' Day visit. While it is the job of the parents to focus on their children's future, it is the grandparents who must help them stay connected to their past.