The group of men hanging out on the street corner mistake me for a cop.

“Oink, oink,” one of them says. “I smell bacon.”

“Here, piggy, piggy,” says another one of these curbside wits. “Oink, oink.”

Man, oh man. I haven’t used pig terms in reference to a cop since I was 8 years old. Back then, I was a kid who didn’t even know what it meant.

These oafs on Pine Street were probably 45 years old, swilling beer and oinking at someone they thought was an officer. I stopped, turned and looked at them like they were zoo animals. Good God, man. Express your disdain for cops all you want. But try to come up with something new.

Another night last week I was hanging out on Park Street looking for a story. Instead of a Pulitzer Prize-caliber event, I found a bunch of skateboarders pounding down the sidewalk.

There were two of them and they took turns wheeling across the pavement in front of the newspaper. With little grace, they hopped up onto the stone benches and tried to roll with elegance back to the sidewalk.

One of them took a classic spill. His skateboard went wheeling out in front of him and skidded from the bench. The extreme sportster was left behind trying to maintain his footing. He had no success.

The young man stumbled, twisted in mid-air and then fell to the pavement. His butt hit first and you could almost see the bones in the rest of his body rattling. Then his back collided with a corner of one of the benches and I tell you, I could feel the pain from that blow from several feet away.

The kid started howling. It was as if he never expected there would be pain involved in the seemingly safe exercise of trying to maneuver four small wheels and a slab of plastic from ground to bench and back again.

The arrogance of youth. The kid even got indignant when I asked if he was OK. He lumbered away rubbing his backside and I went inside giggling.

Grown men who oink at cops and teenagers who can’t believe pain is a part of recklessness make me grin and shake my head.

But they also bring home a point. The movers and shakers in the Twin Cities these days are not the same people I knew when I first came here. The face of the street is changing. Seasoned criminals I knew back in the day are either dead, in prison or just too old to raise hell anymore.

There was a time when I knew every home invader, most crack peddlers and every mugger out there. If I didn’t know them personally, I knew someone who did. It was a sense of proximate familiarity that was both comforting and disquieting.

I don’t know many of the people who are running the cops around these days. I don’t think the skateboarders on Park Street were felons in the making, but they represented a certain demographic.

The teenagers and the 20-somethings are the ones with all the energy. The bad guys I cut my teeth with on the crime beat are taking afternoon naps and oinking at people they believe to be cops because their eyesight is failing.

I pondered this fact long and hard one recent night while slacking off at work. The old get old and the young get stronger. Time and tide waits for no man. Yada yada yada. Clever ways of saying that we all get older and we all slow down.

There was a fracas down Park Street. Some mischief-maker had invaded the police compound and cops were swarming. I was there in seconds. What lively and limber kid was creating chaos down there this time? What brand of youthful exuberance was at hand?

The imp in question was an 86-year-old woman. She was thin but wiry and she screamed and snarled. By the time I got there, she had already bitten one cop on the wrist and now she was kicking a crisis worker in the shin. Police were gentle with her as they waited for an ambulance, but several cops were needed to hold the woman’s arms as she thrashed about.

As it turned out, the lady was upset because someone had stolen her coffee machine earlier in the day. She turned her rage on the cops and caused them an hour of confusion and heavy breathing.

By the time it was over, no real harm had been done. The woman was cared for by medical professionals and the police went out to deal with hoodlums of a more typical age.

But my faith has been restored. The lady on Park Street was four times the age of those skateboarders down the road. But whereas that teenager went whimpering away rubbing his butt, and the older guys were resigned to oinking, the 86-year-old kept on scrapping until she got the attention she wanted. It’s not how young you are, I guess. It’s how young you feel.

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