Press On — ”Crisis? What crisis?”
The first time I saw the Supercuts commercial with the 40-something-year-old skateboarder, I had to chuckle. It was something I could definitely relate to. As the commercial begins, a stylist has just finished a hair-color treatment. She hands the guy a mirror and says that he looks 10 years younger. The client looks into the mirror and says one word, “Dude.”
The next scene is at a skateboard park. The helmeted, formerly gray-haired guy is getting ready to drop-in on a steep, vertical wall. A teenager close by, in a voice that clearly portrays a sense of urgency and warning, says, “Dude!” He repeats it three times, but the dude is already out of sight.
The director leaves the outcome to our imagination. Perhaps the guy was once a tremendous skater and the ramp wall was not a major challenge. On the other hand, based upon the trepidation of the teenager, the mature skater may have crashed and burned at the bottom of the ramp.
In my mid-40s I experienced a similar situation. I suppose it was my own mid-life crisis. I was living in Colorado at the time and it all started with a switch from skiing to snowboarding. We only lived 10 minutes from the ski resort parking lot, so I was there every weekend. The weekend I made the conversion turned into a nightmare. First-time snowboarders tend to fall backward, on their butt, frequently. My rear-end probably hit the packed snow more than 100 times that Saturday and Sunday. By Sunday night I could hardly move. I broke out in a cold sweat. On Monday morning I went to my doctor and found out that all the bone-jarring falls had subluxed my sacroiliac. There was nothing I could do but take pain medication for a few days.
That summer my daughters were all skateboarding, so I decided, since I had learned how to snowboard, it would probably be easy to skateboard. I had been told that if you can snowboard, you should be able to surf, skateboard and wakeboard, since the stances are pretty similar.
I went to the half-pipe ramp late at night, so very few people would see me as I learned. I was making great progress going from side-to-side and I thought it would be just a matter of time before I was a decent skateboarder. But, then, after several late-night sessions, what might have happened to the dude in the Supercuts commercial really happened to me. I took a hard fall off the board and landed on my right hip. It was the same one that was bludgeoned by the mountain while snowboarding. But, of course a cement skateboard park ramp is much harder than the winter snow. It seemed like it took forever to heal. It was close to a year before the hip felt totally normal again. Since that fall I have never been on a skateboard again and don”t plan to change that anytime soon.
Famous psychiatrist, Carl Jung, was the first to use the term and identify the signs of a mid-life crisis. He claimed it was a “normal part of the maturing process,” and called it a transitional stage in which people take into account where they have been and where they might be going. Most people deal with it somewhere between the age of 40 and 60. It often comes with a need for change, excitement, new adventures and often the desire to recapture lost youth.
Aside from the bruises, I made it through my mid-life crisis all in one piece. My wife got me a red sports car and I proceeded to get several tickets rather quickly. I turned that car over to one of my daughters. I haven”t strapped on a snowboard since I left Colorado. Nowadays a Saturday playing golf is pretty exciting, and that”s OK with me.
Gary Dickson is the editor and publisher of the Record-Bee. Call him at 263-5636, ext. 24. E-mail him at gdickson@record-bee.com.
