Airborne Go-Carts in 12 Sentences

When I was about ten or eleven years old, I had a go-cart, a small little thing, its tires the size of a small frozen pizza, its steering wheel the size of a doughnut, its seat barely big enough to fit an eleven-year-old boy who hadn't hit a growth spurt in since third grade, and its protective bars about as thick as a hot dog. It was made for a track in dry weather; I abused it on the bumpy field outside my dad's shop in the rain far too often. This thing, essentially a motorized hamster ball, was the outlet of many of my boyhood fantasies, most of which involved pretending I was a spaceship pilot. Today, however, I drove the thing across the rain-soaked yard, through the four-foot-tall grass that was mowed down to make a track, through the sharp and mildly hazardous corners, and over the ankle-deep puddles. I thought that I could hit the wet and sharp corners safely despite my father's warning. Bad idea. It seemed that when I hit the corner I was beginning to tilt and that the tilt was getting more severe and that eventually none of the four tires were on the ground. I was in the air for about five seconds, and promptly came back down hard. My father did I see running towards me as myself I pulled from the bent aluminum frame. "Can we do that again?" I staggered from the "wreckage" and laughed and hugged my dad out of necessity because if you had a kid who just wrecked a small car in front of you you'd want to hug him too. The pouring rain gave zero visibility, the ankle-deep puddles that caused the whole episode, and the knowledge that the coolest thing that had ever happened to me had just happened made the whole ordeal, as scary as it was for about five seconds, a memorable moment in the best way possible.