Bilingualism

Today I got out to the Millennium Skatepark in Bay Ridge's Owl's Head Park for the first time in awhile. In another first, I brought my skateboard.

At the skatepark there is this regular crew of bowl skaters, many of whom are older than I am, and I have been tempted to ask them to try their boards on many occasions.



So I got back on the board after maybe four years of not skating, and things felt good. Yeah, I was rusty, but I was able to do a little bit of carving around without killing myself. And as the day progressed, I started to feel that old skating groove coming back.

Because I had no ridden there in maybe a month, I was also itching to ride my bike there, so I switched back and forth as I got bored with one or the other. Is it possible to switch between skating and biking? So far it seems to be, although my biking is clearly a lot better than my skating at this point. Will I get to the point where I will want to focus on only one "language" on any given day? Maybe, but it is really liberating to have both things in the realm of the possible. I can't really tell you why I stopped skating. Maybe it's because I lived isolated from any kind of skatepark for so long.

An interesting wrinkle to the day was the presence of an army of young Hasidic kids on the perimeter of the skatepark.


Some of them were cool and talked to us as we skated the bowl...


We encouraged them to come in and give it a try, but they seemed to think that the space was "off limits" to them. When a bunch of them came in without boards or bikes and decided to start walking around on the obstacles (which is a no-no), they got kicked out, which probably only added to their sense of being left out.

Unfortunately things got a bit ugly when a large group on one side of the park started harassing this younger girl who was skating. One of the bowl skaters had been to Hebrew school and knew some of the obscene things they were saying, and apparently they also spit at her.


Once it was clear that this pre-pubescent Hasidic gang was up to no good, the skate and bike superheroes stepped in and confronted them, causing a spectacular scattering of little brats.

Ah, just another day at the skatepark.