User:Atippit

Hi! I'll keep this simple, as I am a pretty simple gal. I live in Texas with my two children in my hometown after being married a couple of times and finding out that wasn't for me. I mean marriage, not guys! I still love the opposite sex, I just no longer feel the need to bond my belongings with anyone else's permanently anymore. :-)

So after living in places like Philly and Denver and visiting over half the United States as well as Scotland, England and France, I settled down back here with my family around me and am happier than I've ever been.

During the school year I teach at a somewhat small 3A high school subjects such as French, English, and journalism and I am the computer technologist for our campus which means I keep about 200 computers networked and working at all times. I love my job and I really love the students I get to work with, but the best part of my life is spent with my two children.

My son will turn 13 tomorrow and I will be the mother of a teenager. Wow, I just saw that in writing and can't believe it's true, but it is. I still feel like a teen myself, especially when my daughter and I (she is eleven-and-a-half going on eighteen!) are skateboarding together.

We started this summer, or I should say SHE started this summer. I started in the summer of nineteen seventy-something??? Anyway it was the seventies and I was best friends with a boy who decided we should get skateboards. We sold aluminum cans and bottles and eventually I had enough money for a wooden one with steel wheels (no ball bearings back then on all boards!) and my friend, Brian, got a PLASTIC (fancy at that time!) skateboard which was more expensive and had rubber wheels WITH ball bearings in them. Needless to say, he had a much smoother ride than I did! But it's what I learned on and we rode day and night...except my family didn't know I had the thing. I was a closet skateboarder! My mom worked for a doctor back in those days and saw terrible accidents that clumsy people did to themselves all the time and she refused to let her daughter do something as foolish as riding on a skateboard. So her daughter didn't tell her! I explained all the bumps, bruises, scrapes, etc. as being results of bike injuries which somehow didn't bother her at all. Go figure!

I remember one time in particular when we were brave enough to tackle the most forboding hill of all in the neighborhood adjoined to ours, the steep drop of Elmwood Hill. We were too young to really give any forethought to the real possibility of our injuries or any impending doom, so we instead looked to it as a need that had to be filled or even more so, a new friend to be greeted. It was time we met.

So we went. Of course when we got there neither of us was going to back out. It was already sealed, our fate that day, and whatever happened would be legend among the rest of our buddies who weren't as brave as we were and who had stayed behind, choosing, instead, to hear the tale told and retold for years to come. We didn't have any protective gear in those days, it was just us and the boards...not even any grip tape on the board to help our feet stay on! Things were very different then and no one even wore buckets (helmets) to protect their noggen. We mounted our boards, gave each other a knowing look and started the downward slope.

It was fast from the get-go and hard to control! We didn't even weave in and out, but headed straight downward toward the base which ended in a curb as the road turned a hard ninety-degrees at the bottom for there was a creek on the other side. Brian made the turn, but I didn't. I did a 180 in the air and slid my bare leg down the bottom quarter of the hill, leaving most of the skin from my right knee on the pavement as I went.

It was awesome.

Later Brian and I would navigate that hill many times much better than that day, but none would be as memorable in my mind, for that was the day I earned the right to be called a true skateboarder.

So before you start calling me a "poser" because I don't skate the way you do on my new World Industries WIDE, LONG skateboard (they are more like surfboards on wheels now!) that is about eight times more expensive than my FIRST one was, just remember that I was skateboarding before it was cool, before Tony Hawk legitimized it as a sport, before people ever heard of an "ollie." Oh, and I have to wear protective gear like all over my body now, not because the skate parks require it (even though they all do) but because my mom is still around and she knows I am skating this time (along with my daughter) and she INSISTED!

At least she is being supportive...thanks Mom. You really are the best.