I originally started riding skateboards when I was just 6 years old.  My dad and I built my first skateboard from a 1x8 plank with some metal wheels and trucks from a pair of vinyl Roller Derby roller skates.  I later managed to talk my parents into getting me a blue plastic skateboard from K-Mart.  It was about five inches wide and had clear yellow wheels with open bearings.  In about 1978 I got a Hobie skateboard for Christmas.  Again, it had a narrow deck that was made of solid oak like a cutting board.

I rode my skateboard all the time and took it just about everywhere I went.  Back in those days it was still legal to ride skateboards just about anywhere, so skateboards were considered a form of transportation to me and my friends.  It was a great way to get a kid from point A to point B.  Skateboarding was in the midst of its 1970's heyday and I could see pictures everywhere of what was going on around the world.  The Dogtown boys among others were redefining a pastime for kids and making it into a lifestyle.  So I was really exited in about 1979 when a skatepark opened in Nashville.  It was the River Gate Skateboard Park and it was paradise.  It had bowls, ramps, a snake run, and all the stuff I saw in the magazine pictures.  The problem was that it was a pretty good drive for my parents to take me there and it cost a lot (to us) to skate, so I was only able to skate there twice before it was shut down in about 1981 when I was 13 years old.  The Dogtown boys had just about finished their run, insurance companies were having their say, and skateboard parks all over the world started shutting down.  For several years skateboarding fell into a dark age.

I rode around the driveway for a while, but other sports and interests took over my time and pushed skateboarding out of my life.  My Hobie skateboard was used to roll heavy stuff around the garage for a while, but my last memory of it was seeing it in a corner of the backyard, rotted and split from the weather.  After loving and riding skateboards for most of my life, I soon forgot that the sport even existed.  I soon forgot that I was ever a skater.

January of 2005, I took my family to Nashville to visit my sister and all of her kids.  She suggested that we take the kids to the newly built public skatepark in Nashville.  We loaded everything that could roll into the mini van for the kids, and I even took the handlebars off my nephew's skateboard in case I wanted to roll around the park a little myself.  I wasn't expecting much because I had seen what became of skateboarding over the years.  I had absolutely no interest in all the kick flippery, rail sliding, and stair jumping that now passed for skating.  So I was dumbfounded when I walked into this new skatepark.  It was a concrete paradise with bowls, halfpipes, quarterpipes, all of the stuff that I knew and loved as a child.  Something inside of me stirred as though I was trying to wake up from a long deep sleep, but I wasn't ready to acknowledge it yet.  I was wishing I had my mountain bike to ride at the park because I had been a dedicated mountain biker for about 15 years at that time and it looked like a great place to practice some technical skills.

A couple weeks later, a friend and I were driving through Oak Ridge, Tennessee.  I took a wrong turn and we drove past a little skatepark build on an old tennis court.  It looked like fun, so as soon as I got home, I gathered up all of the kids and everything that would roll and we went back.  I was disappointed to see signs reading "No Bikes" because I was still thinking mountain biking.  So after taking a good look at their halfpipe, I decided that I could build my own and ride bikes on it all I wanted.  After a quick search on the internet for free halfpipe plans, a $450 trip to Home Depot, and some help from the neighbor's kids, I had a shining new halfpipe in my own backyard.  The only problem was it was useless for bikes because as large as it was, it was too small for bikes.

All of the kids (mine and the neighbor's) were having a great time riding scooters and inline skates on the new ramp, but what could I ride?  A skateboard?  I hadn't been on one of those in years.  I made a trip to Wal-Mart and bought a Wal-Mart quality skateboard.  I came home and got on the ramp with it.  I was amazed at how quickly all of my moves were coming back after all those years.  After hitting a couple good tricks, that's all I wanted to do.

We skated every single day for months.  On weekends the ramp would be busy for 10 to 12 hours a day.  We started making weekend trips to all of these fantastic public skateparks that had sprung up all over the country in the past few years.  Knoxville, Tennessee is the only town of its size in the country without a skatepark so we had to drive.  We traveled to Nashville, Atlanta, Asheville, Chattanooga, and even Virginia Beach to skate their parks.  I started surfing the net and renting videos to learn more about the history, products, people, and places that make this sport great.  My collection of skateboards started to grow (I have a lot less money in my entire fleet of skateboards than most guys have in their golf bag).  Skating was taking over my life.  It's all I talked about.  It's all I thought about.  It's all I wanted to do.  I would fall asleep every night to the spinning of little wheels and grinding of tucks in my head.  But all this time I denied that I was a skater.  I chalked it all up to just goofing off and hanging out with the kids.

Then one evening, my wife (God bless her.  She's been good through all of this.) asked me what this sudden obsession with skating was all about.  She wondered why in 14 years of marriage I had never even mentioned skating and now I was taken over by it.  That was when it hit me.  I finally remembered that I was a skater when I was a kid.  I knew I owned and rode a skateboard as a child, but I forgot that I loved it.  I finally realized that this was not a sudden obsession.  This was a life long love affair with a long and dark absence.  That night I finally awoke from a 24 year sleep to realize what was true but forgotten.  I am a skater.  I’ve always been a skater.

When I go to skateparks now, I almost always run across some other guys my age with the same story to tell.  They skate with one eye on their kids and the other eye on where they're going.  They try to pull off some of their old tricks without throwing out their backs or pulling any muscles.  Every time I meet one of these guys it's like a family reunion.  There are handshakes and welcome backs.  There are old memories to share and new tricks to learn.  There are almost always regrets over all of the years of skating that we missed, but there's hope for the future.  Much to the amazement of our families and friends, our co-workers and neighbors, and the kick-flipping kids of today who think they invented this sport, we are skaters.  We're back, and we're not leaving again.