The Scooter Squad
When I entered first grade at Grundschule St. Cäcilia Preist, I was very nervous. I had only ever known the Kindergarten I attended, where I had my fellow military brat friend, Patrick, and my sweet teacher, Rita. Going to elementary school was nerve-wracking, but it was made easier by the fact that Mark would be there to help me. Before school began, I remember that Mark and I were gifted two Razor scooters. Mine was green and Mark’s was red. I also remember that we thought we were the coolest kids on the block because we got to ride scooters to school every day. I can still remember the ride.
We would turn right out of our home in Preist, and go down a curved, and rather steep hill around to the road that led to school. We would pass Regina’s fish pond(where we would sometimes stop to see the fish), the bushes where we would later hide instead of doing our running(more on that in a second), and a really random bubblegum machine attached to someone’s house. It only cost 10 cents Euro! We would also pass this ghetto concave cobblestone fountain on the right. Mark and I would fly on our scooters, hopping easily up and down onto sidewalks and roads, and taking curves at what felt like near death speeds. Thinking about doing that now kills risk-adverse me, so I’m glad that I could at least enjoy it while I was young. After the fountain, we would turn left super fast, jump up onto the sidewalk, and ride the last few meters to school.
See that painted snail on the ground between the bushes? I helped paint that!
2. This then connects to another memory on our scooters, specifically associated with the fountain I mentioned. It turns out that in the fall and spring, when the fountain was off because it was colder, yet not quite cold enough for snow, the fountain became the perfect skatepark. Now, when I say fountain, you may be imagining a fountain in the middle of a park or square, flowing with water spouting from the top. This was no such fountain. Imagine someone made a bowl of cobblestone, cut the bowl in half, stuck it against a wall, and had a sink like spout above the half-bowl on the wall that filled the fountain. And again, cobbled together. And it was probably about four feet deep at its lowest point, and maybe six feet long?
So when I say skatepark, I mean, we would stand with our scooters at the raised lip of the fountain, put our scooters over the lip, put one foot on the scooter, and use the other to push off. We would go down, then right back up, and over time, we learned to do this sweet move where we would use the millisecond of air time at the end to bring our scooter end flying around to the front, while landing on our feet. I honestly can’t remember if we ever fell, but I do recall our scooter wheels sometimes catching on the raised cobblestones, which I’m sure led to us falling quite a lot. It was always such a fun way to end the school day. We would leave school together, ride up the road, and I would always ask Mark if we could play at the fountain for a minute. He usually said yes, and even after he moved onto the Max Plank Gymnasium, I continued skating the fountain. The one downside to summer vacation was knowing that the fountain would be full, and the days of cobblestone accidents would have to wait until the autumn.
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