I unwrapped that old rink program right there on the rug, and I had to sit down, because inside was a photograph and a list, and the photograph was of a girl and a boy holding hands on skates, and it was Delbert and me.
The man who played that organ at the rink for forty-seven years, an old fellow named Gus who sat up in the booth above the floor, had left it. In the picture, taken from up in his booth, a whole floor of skaters circled under the disco lights, and right in the middle, unmistakable, a boy in a striped shirt taking a girls hand for couples skate. 1960. Delbert and me.
The list was pages long. Names. Dates. Songs.
From his booth above the floor, Gus watched half a century of this town grow up on skates, and every time a boy took a girls hand for the couples skate for the first time, he wrote it down, the names, the date, and the song he happened to be playing, so that the exact moment two kids started would never be lost.
His note said that up in the organ booth he had the best seat in town for watching young people find each other, and that after forty-seven years he simply could not throw all those first hand-holds in the trash. He wrote that the night Delbert took my hand, he was playing a slow waltz, and he had written it down, and that whoever loved the organ enough to save it would find their own first skate waiting inside.
Delbert and I had forty-three years. Gus was right about us. He was right about a lot of couples on that list, near as I can tell.
I have started, this winter, tracking down the folks on Guss list, the ones still living, and telling them that an old organ player saw the moment they took hands on the skating floor and kept it safe for them. A widow across town cried on her step when I read her the date and the song her husband held her hand to in 1965.
My own photograph is framed by the organ now, a boy and a girl and a whole floor of skaters in 1960, and some evenings I play that old slow waltz off Guss list, badly, and I can nearly feel Delberts hand find mine again.
I bought back the skating-rink organ because a few keys were dead. It came full of the first hand-holds of my whole hometown, watched over and written down by a man in a booth who thought young love was worth keeping, and I have been the lucky one who gets to carry it back to them.