Push Scooters
When I was a child, push scooters were the most awesome thing invented by man. Even girls liked them. When we wrote our letters to Santa, we didn’t ask for bikes, we asked for push scooters. And if we already had one, we’d ask for new ones.
Perhaps you’d wonder why we preferred scooters over bicycles. Well, there are several reasons. First of all, we lived in a heavily populated urban area, and we didn’t have a park nearby to play, so we’d just play on the street, in front of our houses. We weren’t allowed to go beyond a few dozen meters from each side. A child with a bicycle would have barely gathered some speed and then be forced to go back. That is, if he was able to ride or stop it. It was extremely difficult to ride a bike on our street.
That is because it was very, very steep. And that’s the other reason why push scooters were so much preferred over bikes. Although both vehicles offered a thrill on the ride down, a bicycle was much harder to push on the way up. Moreover, when the speed was so high that we couldn’t control it anymore (at which point the experience turned from “uber cool” to “mommy!”), a kid on a push scooter could just step down. It was still difficult, but not as difficult as getting down from a bike moving at high speed.
Moreover, push scooters were much cheaper than bicycles. And although we didn’t understand exactly why, we knew that a kid who broke or lost his bicycle would receive a much bigger reprimand than a kid who broke or lost his push scooter.
Of course, even though push scooters were safer, we managed to get ourselves in accidents, nevertheless. For some reason, we didn’t learn from our mistakes or forgot the lessons they gave us. Even after we discovered that a certain game or activity tended to end in an accident, with several kids hurt and crying, we would try it again after a few days.
Out of these accident prone games, I clearly remember two that I enjoyed. The first one consisted in lining several push scooters as close as possible and then let gravity race them at the same time (children and all). The other consisted in having as many children as possible ride a single push scooter.
Eventually, we all outgrew our push scooters. I lost mine in an accident back then. When I had kids of my own I bought them push scooters. However, playing with them in the yard doesn’t seem as fun to me as when I used to play in my old steep street.