-Tap dancer-

1.
The anticipation was nearly overpowering as a kid,
all of ten years, mesmerized by my Uncle Frank
laboring in front of the massive polishing lathe
behind the counter inside his cluttered cobbler shop.

When he shut it down, the whirring shaft of the lathe
slowed smoothly to a stop behind him.–– And then,

he finalized the task-at-hand by tacking metal "clickers"
to the outer edge of each new heel of my old Sunday shoes.

The quarter-moon-shaped clickers were strategically placed,

calculated by the wear-patterns of both the old discarded heels.

Frank was well aware of his culpability in acquiescing to my request,
but tacked the parentally outlawed clickers down, anyway.

2.
During that time and concurrently, it was by the patent-leather tap shoes
worn by my sister, three years my elder, that I first became aware
of the grater dynamic in the sounds of shoes clicking upon a hard surface;

her dancing feet on a fast-track through endless hours of deliberate study,

tapping over the kitchen’s worn linoleum after supper and into the wacky
situation comedies of early nighttime television, broadcast live into the parlors
of the neighborhood's hard-earned tranquility.

Hers, was the burgeoning of genius. 

3.
As for me, the clicking of my heels was no more than a cool,

short-lived sound repeating itself across the sidewalks of Bedford Street

or the narrow corridors of the Hugo A. Dubuque School, where

roaming these and other walking-distance locations
I might have made a name for myself as something of a local curiosity.

Quequechan