Dustin Harbin

Oh, it's so sad! But true! This is absolutely a true story, start to finish. I still vividly remember a) how totally excited I was to get my first pair of roller skates; and b) the complete bewilderment I felt when I fell backwards. Not only bewildering, but quite possibly the first real feeling of bewilderment I'd ever experienced, which thus squared the overall feeling. The very idea of sending a six-year-old kid out by himself into a large neighborhood on roller skates gives me pause today, but my mother always seemed eager to get me out of the house when I was a kid. Although, as we were the fourth and fifth of five kids, who were born over 16 years apart, it's easy to see how she'd be tired of it by then.