Oh yeah, he was hard core.

When Jesse was around 10 years old he spent two weeks of his summer vacation building a skate ramp in his back yard. After only one day of enjoying the fruits of his labor, his neighbor made him take it down because it was too loud.

Jesse begrudgingly took the ramp down, but not before railing against “The Man”.

Jesse continued to skate throughout his youth, and on in to his adult years. He’s no Tony Hawk, but he is quite good. The kids get breathless with excitement when he does skate tricks for them.

As happens with everyone, eventually that line between indignant adolescence and annoyed adulthood blurred, and suddenly he found himself on the other side.

We’re not quite sure when it happened. Did it happen when he got married? When he had kids? When he started making a 6 figure salary? We don’t know, because it snuck up on him.

This morning he read in the paper about the new community area that just opened down town. When we checked it out last week, we saw a bunch of skate boarders doing tricks off the stair ways and rolling around the concrete stage area. He commented that the new area was a “skater’s paradise”.

This morning he scoffed at the photo of the stage area in the paper. It had been set up with chairs, and showed idyllic little families strolling by. Home owner Jesse tapped at the photo and said, “Ha! Notice they don’t show any pictures of those punk kids. What were they thinking building that? Now our neighborhood has become an attraction for little skate thugs.”

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