To the left is a little snapshot I took while out in the suburbs on Mother's Day. Before arriving at my parents' house, I stopped briefly in Worth, IL (a city that borders my hometown) to skate this old curb. I used to skate this curb thirteen years ago when I was a freshman in high school. After a few years of skating at all the familiar spots in my town, I wanted to explore new terrain and see what else there was to discover. I used to skate to the far end of town and walk along a stretch of a main street over the canal and into Worth. As soon as the sidewalk resumed, I skated to the next major street and began looking for new spots. This curb is at a bank drive-up and along with many other ledges and small curbs in the parking lot, was waxed and thoroughly skated before I'd ever found it. I used to love coming here. I'd make a whole afternoon of it, sometimes recruiting friends to join me, sometimes going it alone. I would come home tired and satisfied from the hours of skating I'd put in coupled with the roughly 7 mile round trip.
It's been well over a decade since I've hit this spot with any degree of regularity. At one point, all the wax was sandblasted off this curb, but some locals came and re-waxed it, making it skateable again. I was happy to see that someone in the area is still skating this little spot, though it's definitely not what it was a decade and a half ago. Who knows how long it was around before I'd even picked up a board. There's got to be a pretty long history of Sunday sessions (or Saturday afternoon, after the drive-up closes for the day) at this long, yellow, unassuming slab of concrete.
I suppose if you don't ride a skateboard, there's a good chance that you won't entirely understand this. I remember skating here in the spring of 1999 and walking or skating from spot to spot, intermittently daydreaming about starting a band and more importantly what things would be like when I got older. Occasionally coming back to these old haunts and remembering my adolescent uncertainty, wishful thinking, and hope for the future is a small, sort of full-circle affirmation that I've kept a large part of myself in tact while growing up, that I've held onto to who I was, and that who I was then shaped and helped determine how the next fifteen years of how my life would transpire. Still, it's just a fucking curb.
