Bad Luck With Scooters

When I was a kid we would visit my grandparents every year or so. They always had a lot of really old toys around for everyone to play with. The hot ticket items that everyone wanted to play with were the scooters. We would ride them down the sidewalk in front of the house or around the sidewalks in the park behind the house. When I was about 13 I realized that I didn’t like playing on the scooters and I took stock of exactly why. I came up with many examples of why I should never play on Grandma’s death scoots again. I also figured out that scooters had been bad luck for me in general, but especially at Grandma’s house.

3 or 4 years old – I was sitting on one of the scooters when it slipped out from under me sending my head towards the pavement. My head started bleeding like crazy and I had to have stitches.

8 years old – Riding a scooter in the back yard my brother threw some rocks in front of it and jammed up the wheels. My hands remained on the handle bars leaving my front tooth to try to catch my fall. No more front tooth.

9 years old – Riding scooters and skateboards down a sidewalk on a hill in the park behind Grandma’s house. My brother and I were sharing the one skateboard that hadn’t been taken to the front yard. I went down the hill and crashed into a fence. The chain link fence stabbed into my ankle and If I tried to pull my foot it hurt like crazy. I wasn’t strong enough to pull it out with my bare hands. The skateboard was a few feet away from me and I thought I could slip it under the fence and get my foot out. I asked my brother to hand it to me but he took it and ran to the front of the house because he didn’t want to share it with me. It felt like a couple of hours that I was stuck under the fence bleeding on the pavement but it was really probably 20 minutes. My cousin had the other skateboard and he came out and we used the skateboard to pry up while we pulled the fence out of my leg and my leg out from under the fence.

11 years old – Riding in the front of the house I fell off the scooter and landed on my wrist folding it up under my body.

12 years old – Riding in the park fell off scooter and ripped off my fingernail.

In addition to the above I also had countless jammed fingers, skinned knees and gravel filled hands.

I was either extremely bad at riding on things or very unlucky. If I was bad at it I didn’t want to try to get better. I have watched a great many other kids wipe out extremely hard on scooters and it has only deepened my hatred for them. And those two wheeled “Razor” things, well I have officially named them “Death Scoots” and will never ride one as I believe it will be the end of my existence.