All of my Christmas toys, clothes and games came from garage sales when I was growing up. I was prepping at the top of a snow hill, ready to prove my teenage skiing mastery, when an older guy almost fell over when he saw my skis. “Wow! Those are the first Cubco bindings ever made!”

I grew up in the middle of a relatively wealthy area and so some of the castaway gear I used had been, at one time, pretty top notch. I always felt like it gave me a sort of James Bond mystique, in that most of my sports equipment would have done well in the playboy club of thirty years earlier. I would even recognize the styles in the films. Things like wooden skis.

One Christmas I was overjoyed to open a pair of hockey skates still in the original shrink wrap. I’m guessing they were of about a 1920′s vintage. They looked something like Chuck Taylor All-Stars with metal blades attached to the bottom.

1920's Hockey Skates like Mine

[ed. Holy Kataka! I found a picture, and they really were from the 1920's! Mine were just like this but shiny, new and black, and here they are in a museum!]

In college I started playing B-league hockey. The bizarre smoothness of the ice, completely lacking in the holes, rocks or protruding reeds of a pond, threw me off a at first and it took a while to adjust. I was doing reasonably well when, at some point, someone pointed at my beloved skates and said, “You know, I think those might be holding you back.”

Baur-like skates
When I first started playing in a band, I was using a secondhand guitar run through the one working channel of a homemade Heathkit amp that my dad had built in high school. I tried making my own distortion pedal by overloading a transistor, but I kept blowing them out. Literally. They would explode with a tiny pop and a whip of magic smoke. My friend Doug “Magic” Swanson was our drummer and he was fond of saying, “a great musician never blames his equipment”. I was equally fond of nodding in agreement.

But this time I decided to give the advice some due and dug up a used gear store where I found a pair of the cheapest, most destroyed pair of Baur skates that would still wrap a foot. They were barely alive, but they were also of some near-modern design. I strapped them on, stepped out onto the ice… and flew. Suddenly I was carving and leaping and effortlessly zipping backwards across the ice.

I’m at a time of transition. I’m looking through my safety nets and the things I cling to and wondering which of them are the beloved hockey skates I need to leave behind to move forward. Sometimes it’s hard to know when it’s time.

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