I recall being about five or six years old when a neighbor of my grandmother tried to show me how to bicycle. My grandmother lived in Liberty, Mo., and this neighbor, a girl perhaps the same age as me lived a couple doors down. She had a bike and became intent that I should learn how to ride the bike as well.
She seemed to feel some sense of moral obligation to teach me: Bicycling was the manner in which every free youngster should travel. The walk along Franklin Street was brick, uneven and broken in many places, but charming. I was visiting my grandparents for summer vacation, and the bicycle lesson took place during the gloaming of a warm evening.
The girl would run alongside me, holding the bike up while I tried to understand balance. I never did ride on my own that evening, but it was just enough to give me a good sense of how the performance was intended to be brought off.
A couple summers later, we had moved to a small house on Rush Drive in Fayetteville, Ark. A slew of us kids were playing in my backyard one afternoon. I left the game for a moment, running round the side of the house and spotting a friend's bicycle lying in the front yard. I hopped on it without thinking and rolled down the hillside and onto the street, lickety-split. I could not have been more surprised at how easy it was to bicycle.
The next winter, we visited our relatives in Liberty for the holidays. As part of the Christmas festivities, we drove out to our cousins' house. It seemed rather lackluster to my brother and me, since nearly all of the gifts were being unwrapped by our cousins. After everything was opened, though, Tommy or Robert said, "Hey, wait, what's this?"
We looked.
"What's this? It looks like a piece of yarn. Are those your names on it?"
Why, those were our names. My brother and I started following the yarn. It led out of the parlor and into the entry hall. It continued outside, across the porch and into the darkness of night. Half-way across the north 40, we found the other end of the yarn attached to two bicycles. Merry Christmas.
They were hand-me-downs from Tommy and Robert, and they were perfect.
We took them home to Fayetteville, and I rode all over our neighborhood, learning to ride without hands, figuring out how to skid, and riding to school along Mission Boulevard back in the days when there were no sidewalks, but there wasn't any traffic either.
Where is that bike today?
