By Lauren Lieberman.
The following excerpt is taken from Chapter 1 of The Camp Abilities Story.
My dad spoke affectionately but firmly. “If you don’t learn how to ride this,
I am taking it back to the store.”
That was all the motivation I needed, after begging him for a chance
to ride a unicycle. His best friend from the Air Force had recently visited
with his three children, bringing two unicycles, and I had just begun to
get the hang of it when they left. I begged my father for a unicycle until
he relented, and then I was up at 6 a.m. each day practicing. For a while,
I practiced nearly every available waking hour. My father never took it
back to the store. To this day, I often ride my unicycle a mile and a half
to the Brockport campus and back, and for the occasional birthday party
for friends as “Happy The Clown.”
I grew up in the 1970s in East Goshen, Pennsylvania, on the western
fringe of Philadelphia’s suburbs—surrounded by cows, corn, graveyards, and
fields. At home, sports equipment was littered everywhere:
a tetherball in the backyard, a basketball hoop in the driveway, horseshoes
on the lawn, pogo sticks in the garage, a Ping-Pong table in the basement.
You could hardly walk around without tripping over archery bows, tennis
rackets, and bikes.
We played outside for hours every day after school. My competitive
juices flowed early in life as I would try to break my own records: hits on
the Ping-Pong table, foul shots in the hoop, or ringers in the horseshoe pit.
When I didn’t have a piece of sports equipment in my hands, I would walk
on my hands. To get the mail I’d walk upside-down through the garage and
down the driveway to the mailbox. In school, I played every team sport I
could––tennis, lacrosse, gymnastics, cross-country, and indoor track––and
planned to go to college as a physical education major.
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