The future of America

The Columbia is in pieces and various stages of clean-up so last Sunday A and I took the-highschool-bike (Kent-brand road bike of slight disrepair) and the-after-college-bike (better fitting Trek mountain bike of the 90's) to a local school parking lot to take them for a spin.

Seeing how neither of them had been ridden in at least A's lifetime and the preceding 9 months, in the case of the Trek, and much longer, in the case of the Kent, I felt it was probably a good idea to try them out away from traffic before doing much else.

Surprisingly, the Kent (which was never that great to begin with) did just fine, but the Trek was having some gear shifting (or would that be gear not shifting?) problems.

But here's the good part:  while I was taking a look at the Trek to see if I could figure out anything intuitive to do with it, one of the 14ish-year-old skateboarders who were cruising around the school near dusk (town officials love that!) stops and asks us what the problem is and if we'd like him to take a look at it...

...he tells us he has his tools and whips out an Allan wrench set from his backpack.

(probably not this one but it might as well have been)

...tells his skateboard friend he'll just be a second and tries the shifting, tightens up a few things, tells me to give it a try and does a few more fixer kind of things.

A and I ride off into the sunset, as does 14ish-year-old skateboard kid and his similar age skateboard friend (or more towards the sunset since it was dusk).

Personally, (and consider this said in my best suburban mom tone) I though it was very cool of him.

No actual crystal ball in my possession, but I like the idea that kids like that are our future.  I guess everyone reads enough about screwed-up teens and "what's the world coming to?" stuff, but the kids I know are better than that and apparently so are at least some kids I don't even know.

Plus, some of them carry tools with them when they skateboard at local schools--who knew?