The 42-year old skateboarder

Old skateboarders' never die, they just get hit by cars and think they die.

Then they're resurrected, full of renewed youthful energy but wearing knee and elbow pads.

I almost ran into a skateboarder yesterday on 28th Ave. between Balboa and Anza. He was zigzagging downhill, using the sidewalk and the street so that he was difficult if not impossible to see. There was a little gray in his hair and in his sideburns.

And then there was a moment between us when we were parallel in our decline. I looked at him from my car and he looked at me from his skateboard. As the older man I assumed the role of an adult while he, much younger than I, played the role of the child who knew he'd done something stupid.

I didn't hit him, and he didn't give me the finger as a younger skateboarder might have.

There is a God, I thought, grateful for the divine intercession that prevented collision.

How unoriginal, I then thought, to think of God at such a time! And that I've lived my whole adult life with the illusion of originality! Imagining that in my lifetime there could ever be anything original! Only gurus like Heraclitus and Socrates and Jesus and Confucious were ever original.

The skateboarder was now in my rear-view mirror. He ran the stop sign at Anza, a gambling man, and beat the odds.

In the near distance the sound of sirens filled the air.