Lucy Jasper, left, poses with skateboarding instructor Gabe Triplette of Bearings Skateboard Academy in January 2017.

I wanted to be encouraging. I ended up being paternalistic.

Last week, I wrote a column headlined, “When being friendly at a Bend skatepark goes wrong,” about an incident that occurred one recent morning at Ponderosa Skatepark in Bend. I wrote it fairly quickly, right after the incident, before heading into a weeklong vacation.

I wish I’d taken more time to reflect before writing. Instead, I doubled down on my behavior. To recap briefly, I attempted some friendly conversation with a woman skating at the park. As she was leaving, I said, “You’re skating really good. Are you a beginner, or did you maybe used to skate?”

I wrote that I wished I’d said what I meant: “How long have you been skating?”

She addressed only my first question, saying it back to me: “Are you a beginner?” to which I replied, “No.” She said something I didn’t catch about “Not a beginner,” got in her car and left.

In last week’s column, I trotted out some of my other small-talk successes, and I attributed my failure to my poor choice of words. I wrote how, despite it going poorly that time, I was going to keep talking to fellow skaters.

I couldn’t have said why, but I didn’t feel great about the column. I returned to a few emails, including one with the subject line, “Put on your gender politics hat, dude,” that took me to task,  pointing out how I’d failed to think about what the woman might have been going through herself, her history, and her history with men.

While I thought of her as a peer, what I failed to see was that as a male skateboarder of 40-something years, I might have a sense of belonging that a woman in a male-dominated, or formerly male-dominated activity, would not necessarily share.

In the column, I attributed the woman’s rueful smile when I began talking to her as being along the lines of “target acquired.” I thought it absurd that anyone would perceive me as paternalistic, when it turns out I was being paternalistic.

In this space, I try simply to write about what life feels like, at least to me, and my perspective is limited. As the “gender politics” emailer, a regular reader of the column, told me, “Yes, your column is about you, but try to not make everything about you in order to get fodder for your column.”

Ouch. That reminds me of how a girlfriend 30 years ago put it after I’d claimed “But I’m sensitive” after doing or saying something insensitive — the quote stays with me though the inciting incident does not — “You’re sensitive, but only about yourself.”

Hearing such truths in my 20s was hard, and it’s no easier in my 50s. My wife and I raised three daughters, and our family regularly talked about the Bechdel test and the male gaze and how annoying it is when strange dudes say things like “Smile.” None of that buys me a pass or truly helps me understand what it feels like to move through the world as a woman, what it would be like to be harassed, or feel unsafe, or to be told to smile by dumb strangers.

Another reader wrote: “It is rare to participate in a formerly male dominated sport (last time I went mountain biking, there was one man for every five women out there, which is a 180 from 10 years ago) without a man offering unsolicited advice.” She mentioned how the last time she was at Phil’s Trail, a man told her “never panic!” when he rode up fast from behind and startled her. “There was no panicking occurring, but OK,” she wrote.

Even feeling obliged to engage in a seemingly harmless conversation with men she doesn’t know “gets old after a while. Sometimes a person just wants to exist without commentary from unknown guys.”

Though these emails were a start, it is my wife who best knows how to crack open my nesting dolls of insecurity and defensiveness. She persists patiently, as though some enlightened being of pure love might be found below, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

Among other things she Socratically asked: Had the other skater been a guy, would I have spoken to him the same way?

It was a long conversation and a topic I’d have preferred to avoid on a warm summer night drinking wine on our deck. Eventually my guardrails came down, and I started to see how my phrasing and approach — she clearly hadn’t wanted to talk — were not  just poorly chosen or timed, but also paternalistic.

Thinking more about the incident, sexism and skateboarding led me to recall how disappointed I was after my twin daughters, Lilly and Lucy, now 22, didn’t stick with skating after trying it years ago, including some girls’ night sessions with women. Was this other skater at Pondy a stand-in for them? Was I being paternalistic — from the Latin “pater,” meaning father — because I wanted to be encouraging?

I’d like to think so. But if that had been my objective, I very likely failed, noted the first reader I quoted above: “There’s a good chance she will never go to the skatepark again now because she just wants to skate and not deal with the emotions this may have dredged up for her.”

Revisiting this subject was not something I wanted to write about this week, but thinking my attempt to encourage only discouraged was too hard to ignore. As I’ve said many times, skateboarding is one of the most egalitarian, accessible things we have going in a country increasingly defined by capitalism and greed. It can be communal, but the focus is on individual achievement. It is for the young and old and in between, every race, gender and income level.

So I say to that skater, should she read this: I am sorry. I was wrong. I sincerely hope my feeble attempt at encouraging conversation, and the column in which I doubled down on it, haven’t discouraged you from skating however, whenever and wherever you feel like it.

As for me, if there’s one thing all skaters understand, it’s trying to do it better next time.