Melon Protector

There’s something about the shape of my head that seems to make helmets look strange. Maybe because it’s sort of oblong but helmets ride weirdly on my noggin — and we know it’s not from having too much brain stuffed in there.

At Jiminy Peak recently, almost everybody on the mountain was wearing a helmet, and by almost everybody, I mean over ninety percent of the skiers and boarders. This represents a very big change in a very short time.

It wasn’t long ago that you would just see kids with helmets and an occasional adult, who was regarded as an oddball. Since then, helmet use has caught on like wildfire.

A helmet won’t necessarily protect you from a severe blow to the head or the multitude of other injuries you could suffer, but it couldn’t hurt. And forget about looking weird — have you seen some of the strange sh*t people wear while skiing?

3 thoughts on “Melon Protector

  1. Whether intentional or not, this was a very nice PSA.

    When I lived downstate, a nonprofit down the street from me called the Association for Neurologically Brain Injured Children (ANIBIC) would have really liked this post.

  2. Helmets are so much better, and so much better looking, than they were when we were growing up. Bought my first skis and ski clothing at Herman’s in SmithHaven Mall (1977), and I still remember my mother trying to convince me to buy a helmet. I told her that I’d run into a tree on purpose if I had to wear one. I still have the bright green Gerry Goose Down jacket, which I guess seemed cool at the time. Maybe I was already damaged.

    Fast forward a couple decades, and I’m pretty sure I’d be drooling (more) if I hadn’t been wearing a helmet while trying to snowboard last year. Renting the helmet when I rented the snowboard was money well spent. Returning everything to the rental counter after 45 minutes was the second best decision I made that day.

    1. I have often thought about — hell, DREAMED about — how cool I would be if I could only snowboard. Maybe I need to take a lesson to wipe these crazy thoughts out of my head.

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