Six years old, too big for safety straps, I tucked my legs close to my chest and gripped the curved plastic sides of the child’s seat on my mom’s bike. Mom pushed off and peddled fast up Safari Drive. California wind whipped hair from our faces.
Down the street, four-year-old Stewart Ross sat on his front porch, his freckled face resting on his palms, his red hair hanging in his eyes.
“You don’t know how to ride a bike? Everybody knows how to ride a bike,” he called out.
Stewart ran into his backyard. Seconds later, legs spinning, he shot out across the grass and into the street on his tiny red two-wheeler. He zipped in circles around us.
“Why are you riding in the baby seat?” he said.
Immediately, I wanted out of the baby seat.
A week later, I learned to ride.
4 comments:
Riding down a hill too fast, turning the corner at the bottom anyway, missing the street and hitting a parked car, broke blood vessels in the ankle, my foot swelled up, heat was a bad idea, my ankle remembers, and turned black when I was pregnant with babies.
I was babysitting younger siblings. John fell off his bike and was crying. I told him to stand up and walk home. He obeyed, but his leg was broken, really broken--he wasn't just faking for attention. I vowed to be a nicer babysitter.
Learning to ride at the Dickenson Elementary school blacktop smooth playground. Dad holging onto the back of my banana seat bike, running beside me, and not telling me when he let go. I thought he was still holding on until I followed the circle painted on the blacktop and saw him way back behind me and promptly lost confidence, wobbled and fell and skinned my knee and remember wailing, "I thought you were holding on!" and his reassurance that he knew I could do it and his big smile and trying to not laugh at me. We did it again, this time he said he would tell me when he let go of the seat but to pretend he was still holding on, and I kept going and the elation, the JOY of riding by myself, going forward and getting the feel of riding! Powerful memory.
1) Riding home from work, I saw another cyclist ahead of me swerve slightly on the trail and then she flew over the top of the handlebars. I and another cyclist hurried up to this panicked, crying lady as she was trying to sit up. She said something like "is it ok? please help it...please help it!" We soon realized as we inspected her bike and a nearby small animal carcass that a squirrel had jumped at her bike and locked up her front wheel as its body jammed up between the tire and the brakes. She had tried to avoid the thing with her swerve, but ended catching it anyway and was thrown over the top of her bike. The other cyclist who had stopped, made sure the squirrel was dead, then stayed with the lady, allowing me continue on my way home.
2) On my desk I have a stick that I picked up on my way to work one day. Not just any stick, but one gnawed on at both ends by a beaver. To me, it is a metaphor of hard work and persistence...At the North end of Old Town Alexandria, VA the bike path continues parallel to the GW Parkway on a boardwalk, then through a low-lying area with a stream. Beavers had taken up residence, and started up a war against the Department of Interior (staff & rangers that cared for the GW Parkway National Park). The rangers appeared determined to keep the bike path from flooding, because it was high-use for the local walkers and joggers. The first battles involved the rangers sandbagging, but a few good rains showed that the sandbags only kept the water covering the trail after it would inevitably flow around the sandbags. Later, they tried a system of conduits/pipe to drain the high-water areas. But this did not move enough water to keep it away from the trail. Finally, they moved the trail up closer to the Parkway, and trail users have been happy ever since. At some point during the war, which I think the beavers won, I hopped off the boardwalk onto one of the dams and pulled out a 3-foot, 2-inch diameter stick, which is now on my desk.
Thank you for your stories!
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