My car was in the shop and the bus stop is quite a walk away. Walking there, I thought, I wish I had a skateboard. (I can run for miles, so I save my legs for that. Walking close to a mile in hard soled shoes ain't good for the feet.) I went to Target and got a skateboard. When I got home, I got on my skateboard, coasted to 7-11 and got a cupcake. In the parking lot of the 7-11, with my skateboard in one hand and a cupcake in the other, I felt like a little kid.
I'm 38 years old and I felt like I was a boy with my whole life ahead of me. The parking lot, the taste of chocolate bread in my mouth and a long piece of wood with wheels under my arm, sent me to a far, faraway place. If you see me around Silverlake riding my skateboard, you know that I'm trying to catch a lost era of my life.
I had a skateboard when I was in elementary school. It was such a freeing time. I still remember it romantically. Maybe that's why I tried to capture a little bit of it in my second book. In this paragraph, the boy Emerson is still grieving the loss of Jun, his older brother.
"Sometimes on rainy days, he’d shut his door, and pull out the skateboard, pushing it from one end of his room to another. Sometimes Emerson pulled out the skateboard just to look at it. There were dark footprints from where Jun used to stand on it. The varnish was almost gone. The red plastic wheels were nicked and turning brown."
5 comments:
I've never rode a skateboard before, believe it or not.
Hmm..
Jason, you need to get one. It's one of those things you must experience.
We lived on a big hill growing up so we'd actually sit on our skateboards and race downhill trying to crash into each other.
Ahh, youth...!
I sure hope I see you skating around town! You make me wonder, why is it that we stop doing the things that brought us such joy in our youth?
noel on a skateboard???? that's one photo we'd all like to see...
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