This is a long and boring post, but I wanted to share.  

This was me yesterday:

So a zillion years ago when I was a teenager, back in the mid 1970s, the man my mom worked for put together a group of investors and designed and built the first skateboard park of its kind in South Florida.  Although I didn't really skateboard much, I was hired to work there and did so for my junior and senior years of high school.  It was a cool place and became very well known in the skateboarding world.  A scrawny little skate-rat named Alan Gelfand used to spend his every free moment there, and the kid became sort of a phenom and a local legend.  He was a good kid but used to sneak into the park all the time and eventually it got to the point where he was so amazing to watch, we just let him do whatever he wanted.  Assuming most here know little about skateboarding, he invented a skateboarding move called "The Ollie" that has become pretty much the base of all of the crazy acrobatic things you see now (where the board and rider's feet leave the surface without hands holding them together).  

So to make a boring story less long, this was a part of my childhood that was gone and was nothing but memories.  However, a couple of years ago I was contacted via Facebook by a guy I didn't remember who said he used to hang out at the park back then and he was an amateur photographer who had a collection of photos from the skateboard park and he was writing a book on the history of skateboarding in South Florida.  I spoke to him for a while and reminisced about some names and my memories of the park and the people.

I didn't think much about it afterward, but recently I received a note from him that his book was finally published, so I ordered one.  What came was an amazing, gigantic piece of work full of photos of a place (and people) I never thought I would see again...a flood of long lost memories.  Very cool to see.  And I was quoted multiple times throughout the book and that was kind of fun to see as well.