Starting pool skating in my forties

I  started teaching high school wood shop recently, and one of the woodworking projects I found I like most is making skateboard decks.  This rekindled my interest in skateboarding as an adult, after not skating for over 25 years.  I started again by skating the longboards I built, just cruising around on them, but it felt so good that I started thinking about doing the kind of skating that I'd always dreamed of but had been too afraid to do: pool skating.  I've never skated half-pipes, and I can't do an ollie, but I decided to give it a try.

So, in July of 2016, at 45 years old, I went to the park and pushed around the bottoms of the pools, and it was every bit as enjoyable as I envisioned.  I only had a longboard, which made it hard to turn tight enough for pool skating, but I had that first taste.  I got some guy to show me how to drop in, and after a few tries (no hit-the-ground falls though) I was able to drop into about a four foot bowl.  The next day I went to my local skate shop and bought a more traditional board, a popsicle-shaped job that could make the tight turns when carving a pool, and then went right back and dropped in again.  Unfortunately, the short wheelbase of the popsicle deck had a completely different feeling, and I fell backwards and dislocated my shoulder on the first run of my second trip to the park.
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Here I am at the hospital after an x-ray.

It was maybe 9 months until I was able to sleep on my right side again, and after a year I still couldn't throw anything.  After a long and frustrating year and a half I had healed enough to think about going back for my third skate session.  I read a lot and learned that a longer wheelbase would help with the kind of fall I took, so I bought yet another deck made just for pool skating with a 15.5" wheelbase, and I've been pool skating with that for about four months now.

Eureka Springs skatepark is a chill little pool in the trees.

Feels like flying.

The important and beautiful thing about pool skating is that it feels so good.  The feeling of gravity and centrifugal forces, the weightlessness at the top of a carve, the flow and focus, it is all so much like I imagine flying would feel.  I still can't get into the tiles or coping, and my frontside carves are weak, but how I look skating doesn't matter to me at all, and I wish I hadn't worried so much about how I looked back when I first wanted to do this in my teens.  I healed a lot faster then. 

11/4/2018 Edit:  I have now built up the courage to drop in, which has enabled me to get into the tiles in my local skatepark's bowl.