Unique Opportunities

This blog is about riding on two wheels, but it might have been about riding on one wheel if my parents had ever bought me a unicycle like I asked for.  Every.  Christmas.

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: