A ritual of my childhood was going through the Sears catalog in the weeks before Christmas, circling everything I wanted. Supposedly, my parents used this wish list to figure out what to get me. OK, so maybe I was a little (a lot) on the greedy side, asking for way more than I knew I would or should get. But I really did want a unicycle – with training poles. In some ways, at least, I was a realistic child. Although I never did get that unicycle, think of how different my life could have been if I had.
I never participated in any organized sports until I started playing church softball in seventh grade. However, my parents could have given me the look and feel of an athlete years sooner. The Sears catalog said so:
Furthermore, I might have been an excellent unicycle hockey player. How about this for a different spin?
As a teenager, I played a fair amount of street hockey. It started with a group of older guys at church who played hockey in the fellowship hall. We ran around in tennis shoes and used a soft, rubber puck. Soon thereafter, I started playing various sports with a group of guys from school. We met after school at Oak Grove Elementary and played softball, flag football, basketball, Frisbee golf, dodgeball, pickle, or – you guessed it – hockey. Our hockey puck was a tennis ball. Imagine how much more fun our hockey games would have been on unicycles!
I even could have been a unicycle time trialist:
Alas, so many lost unicycle opportunities! But nothing could be as epic as this:
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