I love riding bicycles but learning to ride was clouded by fear, pain and envy.
To begin with, we were not a “cool-bike” family. Our bikes weren’t even decent. We got a couple of hand-me-down bikes from our cousins up the street. Or, rather, my older brothers got those hand-me-downs and then I got them when they were through with them.
My oldest brother was gifted a cheap-ass ten speed for a birthday, and my other brother got a cheap-ass three-speed for his. Despite being new, they were perpetually broken, slightly better than the hand-me-downs.
The Wright Brothers Bikes and Aeroplanes
My older brothers taught themselves how to repair those hand-me-down bikes, taking them apart and reassembling like the Wright brothers. They fixed tires, repaired chains, and painted the frames, transforming old, crappy bikes into slightly less crappy bikes with crappy paint jobs. Their reward was the means to get out of the neighborhood for a few hours.
I observed them from a safe distance and learned that old bikes are a pain in the ass.
The bike I got had training wheels, and that’s how I rode around. It seemed easy to me—hardly any risk of tipping over—so that’s what I did. But soon, I realized I’d become an embarrassment to my father.
“He’s going to be the only kid in high school biking around with training wheels,” he said to my mother one day. “For the love of God, can’t he figure it out?!”
I was entering first grade, not high school. But the mistake we only made once was to correct my father when he was on a roll, so I let it slide.
It’s not like he spent any time teaching me how to ride a bike. Between his job, night school, and playing with the three different softball teams, it was surprising he was even around to see me ride a bike.
For all I know, this may have been a veiled attack at my mother, who had taken ten years off her job at the bank to bear and raise me and my brothers. Once I entered first grade, she was rejoining the workforce. Perhaps the complaint about my inability to bike without training wheels was his way of saying, “Jesus, Margaret, what do you do all day?”
“I need a new bike,” I blurted out. There were kids in the neighborhood with banana-seat bikes sporting streamers on the handle grips and sissy bars to support the lower back.
With a bike like that, you could lay down rubber. One kid even had brightly colored tires, so he could squeeze the hand breaks on his fancy new bike and leave an orange skid mark on the sidewalk.
“The only orange skid mark you’re going to make is on your underwear,” my father quipped.
Green-Eyed Envy
I certainly wanted one of those fancy new bikes. My fear of falling kept me from learning to ride. I saw no problem with using training wheels. They were a safety feature, in fact, so what was the big deal with me staying safe?
One afternoon late in August, Mom dragged me away from the cartoons on television and demanded I get on the bike. “I don’t care how long it takes,” she said, “but today you learn to ride.”
I love my mom and all, but she really didn’t have any practical advice. I’m pretty sure she didn’t know how to ride a bike, either, and that was why she hadn’t cared about it much until that point. She was probably savoring these last days around the house before returning to the salt mines. My older brothers were gone all summer, having biked away with friends, and I had the television to keep me busy. As long as there was bread served with dinner each night, Dad didn’t worry too much about what happened while he was gone. From what I could see, Mom had it pretty easy, washing clothes in the morning, gardening in the afternoon, and serving up baloney sandwiches with yellow mustard in between.
But my inability to bike like a normal boy threatened all that.
When your only tool is a pipe wrench…
She found a pipe wrench in the garage and beat on the training wheels until they fell off. There was no turning back.
We started on the driveway, but the gentle slope to the street terrified me and I put the bike down on the lawn, gripped with fear, on the verge of hysterics. We were still in the first minute of training.
“Okay,” she said. “We’ll try the sidewalk.”
There wasn’t any slope on the sidewalk, but it wasn’t what you would call smooth, either. In fact, the cracked cement was only marginally smoother than our brick road. Tree roots had lifted entire sections. Walking was an adventure. The great challenge was to steer the bike along the path of least resistance.
Mom was undeterred. Back and forth we went, me quivering on the seat, trying to steer and pedal while Mom held onto my seat and ran alongside me, keeping me balanced.
Finally, I caught on and, just like that, I propelled myself down the sidewalk. I still tumbled and fell when I braked because I didn’t know any other way to stop, but even that got better.
At supper that night, as we all gathered around the table, my mother announced: “Mickey learned to ride a bike without training wheels today.”
My father smiled. “How about that!” Then he slathered margarine on a slice of bread and stuffed half of it in his mouth while reaching for the meat platter.
There is no “bad” publicity
For years to come, my prowess with bicycles would be mentioned at family parties. Not the fact that I learned to ride, but that I was three, maybe four years slow in developing the skill. But it wasn’t my father deriding me.
“We didn’t think it’d ever happen,” my mother would say to one of her sisters, repeating the oft-told story yet again. “I went up and down that sidewalk with him a thousand times until he learned.”
I felt the shame of a stinging rebuke. Really, what was happening is that my mother was proudly telling her own parenting story, taking a moment to pat herself on the back in public.
I don’t begrudge her that moment. After all, she taught me how to ride a bike.
Meanwhile, at My Writing Desk…
I’m still making progress with the work-in-progress. I’m not setting the world on fire, but I’m making decisions about the story. Just tonight, while taking a break from writing the Picayune, I had thoughts about a change to the beginning.
Novels, if you haven’t heard, are never completed. They’re abandoned in favor of other projects.
Let’s hope I get it right before the project implodes on the bottom of the ocean.
The Moth
I attended the Moth two weeks ago, but my name wasn’t pulled from the hat. It was a wild, Mothey night, though. The first storyteller spoke of sexual escapades with a bad Mormon; the third walked off the stage, adding an element of physical movement that was bizarre in that we couldn’t hear what she said.
It would have been a hoot if she returned to the microphone and said, “…and that’s who shot Kennedy.” Alas, she only offered a pithy ending to her unheard story.
The winning story was an amazing tale of a life well lived and the answer to what happens to us after we die. I’d tell you what she said, but you kind of had to be there.
Maybe You’d Like
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Next Picayune
I’ll be back in two weeks with tales from Cleveland, Chicago, and Kookamunga (if I play my cards right).
Thanks for reading the Mickey Picayune.
All the best,
—mickey