Can You Skate?

"Oh, just a little." Clunk, clunk,clunk...CRASH, clunk,clunk,clunk.
-Sonja Henie in all her movies.

Writing about John Lennon's death got me thinking about that apartment my sister lived in on West 53th Street. I remember when she moved into the building it was not completely finished. Some of the apartments where still being worked on and all the hallway floors were cement because no carpeting had been put down yet. One Sunday we took a tour of the building and noticed that most of the unoccupied apartments on the upper floors were unlocked so we decided to check them out. We walked through a few looking at how they were laid-out, what the views were, how many bedrooms they had, and how big they were.

Note: This was the beginning of the Eighties and roller skating was very big. My sister and I both had skates and every once in a while we would put them on and skate over to Central Park. This was before inline skates. The ones we had were like figure skates with four skateboard wheels on them. The kind of skates that you lace up. The kind that always made your feet go numb if you laced them tight enough to feel secure in them.

While we were walking around we also noticed that all the apartments had nice, new wood floors. Nice, new, smooth wood floors. Nice, new, smooth wood floors in every empty room of every empty apartment. Nice, new, smooth wood floors that we knew would be great to skate on.

We went back to my sister's apartment, put our skates on, and then took the elevator to the top floor. We started at the south end of the building on each floor. We would put our ear to the door of an apartment and if we did not her any noise coming from inside we would quietly turn the doornob and push the door open. If the apartment was unoccupied, and most were, we skated inside and through all the rooms including the bathrooms. When we closed the door to the last apartment on a floor we would skate back to the elevator and ride down to the next floor. We skated our way through and down the building. When we reached the basement we skated around the laundry room. Then we rode the elevator back up to my sister's apartment and called it a day.

(Ah, to be young and stupid again.)