Among the riches available today on CBS Sunday Morning was a human-interest story by a 42-year-old podcaster on the supercool skateboard his wife surprised him with on his birthday.
Without a doubt, it was the best present I'd ever gotten, and also the one that most necessitated me updating my will. Because you see, while inside I felt like a kid again, outside I remained very much a middle-aged man with a sense of balance that could only be described as intermittent.So far, not bad; I thought it was rather sweet. But then it turned pathetic:
I didn't let that stop me, though, and despite more than a few falls I felt like it was coming back to me.
Heck, I even skateboarded past a bunch of teenagers one time and I swear I heard one of them say, "That guy is cool!"Then he encountered this well-known meme:
Until he happened to meet the celebrity skater whose name his new skateboard bore. This man is fifty years old, and still skates daily, though he feels "nervous before jumping his board 30 feet in the air and completely rotating it two-and-a-half times." Our guy immediately felt better!
I suppose everybody has their own philosophy about aging. Some want to be a young among the young again. They can't do that, but try to stop them from trying. My feeling is that if you're fifty and you want to do something, whether you did it as a kid or are only taking it up, you should go ahead. Don't expect your fellow kids to embrace you as one of them, and don't cringe or retreat if you overhear them sneering about the old guy or gal trying to relive his or her youth. If you're fifty and you want to skate, skating is a middle-aged thing.
It's like gender in that respect. I keep citing the "woman-identified woman" who,
at the 1971 Council on Religion and the Homosexual symposium, was challenged by someone in the audience because of her apparently masculine attire. But Lynda explained, “This short haircut, because it is mine, is a woman’s hairstyle. These so-called men’s boots, because I am wearing them, are women’s boots. This pipe, because I am smoking it, is a woman’s pipe. Whatever women wear is women’s wear. It is a matter of individual choice – and comfort.”*Your skateboard, because it's yours, is a forty-two-year-old's skateboard. Or a fifty-year-old's. You do what you want to do, and you don't worry if it's somebody else's idea of age-appropriate or not. If any kids want to claim that it's like totally theirs, and you're engaging in cultural appropriation, they're wrong.
Gender is also a good analogy because skateboards were originally a boy thing, and girls encountered pushback when they took them up. Ditto for electric guitars, but that's another story. So now there's a group for girls and women based in Venice, California, with a worldwide online presence and regular group outings:
"You don't have to, like, rip. You don't have to do tricks. We're just asking to kick push. We're there to, like, support you in it. The whole idea is we're trying to make this less intimidating for women," Osinski said. "When you're a woman alone on a skateboard, it's very different. When you're a woman together, with all these other people… you really create girl power. Girl power is real. You can change things in your community."But there shouldn't be any need to gender skating, or to tie it to age or subculture.
Of course, I hope you'll wear protective gear, as serious skaters do. And when you fracture your hip in a fall, then it may be time to hang up the board. (Not necessarily, though: some people bounce back from such injuries.) I've written before about the bodily realities of aging. At 57 my body had begun to slow down; now, at 68, my age is written on my flesh more than ever, and it's not going to be erased. Still, as much as possible I negotiate between my body and my mind. If I want to do it, and I can, then it's what an old person does. This old person, anyway.
*Del Martin and Phyllis Lyons, Lesbian/Woman (Bantam Books, 1972), page 81.
