By Mark Morelli
Who is that 39-year-old man zipping around Cuyahoga Falls on one leg and a new hair lick?
Who's that guy flashing the dufist jack-o-lantern grin each time a kid says "Wow, cool!" and a geezer says, "Well, whattya know" as they point with delight to his foldable, five-pound aluminum kickboard scooter?
I'll just say this: My hairline isn't so much receding as it is healthily windblown.
Zipping over the bricks near the fountain on the RiverFront Mall. Riding with my daughters around and around the block. Racing kids on bikes in the Preston School parking lot. I'm feeling apple-cheeked as a boy in a Ray Bradbury story.
"Oh, I know why you bought it," my wife said, recalling a recent "Sixty Minutes" profile. "You saw Kevin Spacey riding one."
Hmmph. So I'm a starstruck copycat? Well, maybe a little. (And I am thankful the "Sixty Minutes" story wasn't about Robert Downey, Jr.) But the real, deeper reason why I bought a push scooter is because I'm turning 40 later this year and, frankly, I'm not taking it well. I'm becoming a middle-aged man, neither old or young. Smack dab in the middle of life, still waiting for laurels, still climbing the ladder even though the rungs - or is it my back? - feel creaky. I have gone this far without making much of myself career-wise unless you count all the essays I've published for what amounts to a week's worth of lunch money, and that's ordering water as my beverage.
I'm still basically the same dream weaver I was in college. I've earned my living as a journalist, a writer of ads and web sites, and yet my real writing has just gone absolutely nowhere. My novel, an agoraphobic butterfly, remains in its perpetual cocoon. I wrote three plays that died in the second act. Not onstage. In the typewriter. While theater aficionados will rejoice the three evenings saved from oblivion, I am still frustrated. My beret-and-goatee dreams aren't behind me, and at the same time, they aren't on the horizon either waving like maniacs for me to come on down. They're stuck in my craw. Post-young Turk, pre-washed up - why, I am Kevin Spacey in "American Beauty." Yeah, so, I had to be very, very careful in choosing my new, mid-life hobby.
So right after watching Kevin Spacey zip around Manhattan on his wiry little scooter, I bought one at Eddy's Bike Shop in Stow. Now, for the first time in my young and not-so-young life, I'm turning heads. At the RiverFront Mall l I let a sweet older woman take a spin and once more she wore bobby sox. A 60ish businessman in a suit let loose a "wheeee-hee-hee!" when he took my scooter for a spin in Akron's Cascade Plaza. My old neighbors regale me with wonderful tales of the orange-crate-and-skateboard scooters of their youth. The neighbor kids want to race me to the corner. And get this: The little turds demand I spot them a two-house lead.
Am I evoking vigor, or what? My legs are taut. My lungs filled with fresh air. I get more excited taking a sharp curve than in coming up with a clever ad slogan. In the past twenty years I've been in lots of races. But those kind make you pant slovenly and loosen your necktie.
Watch me on my kickboard. One leg pushing off concrete, the other balancing my body on an icy sliver of aluminum the size of a shoe box. Push, push, glide. . . push, push, glide . . . push, push, gli- . . .
"My turn!" cries my three-year-old daughter.
"In a minnit," I respond, again and again.
"But we've been waiting a long time," says the seven-year-old.
"Oh yeah?" I say. "Thirty years?"
