I Want To

In the drowsy fine warm air of noon, a memory came to me.
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These impressionist images from my maybe-it-happened mind come to me regularly, because my past is as efficient and wondrously tenacious as the manner in which plants distribute their seeds. The images and memories stick like burrs, or they float on easterly breezes, or they are carried by birds and dropped into the grassy expanse of my moments.

What I remembered — and I invite you to search for a similar fragment in your own mind— was what it was like to mount my bike when I had neither Adams apple nor beard nor a hunger to see anything beyond the quiet, sloped and shaded streets of my boyhood.

My bike was metallic blue, with a white banana seat and ape-hanger handlebars, a surprise gift from my wild, careening father during one of his sudden visits throughout my childhood, visits that barely number in the double digits. It was perhaps the fanciest gift I ever received as a child, and I was rarely more than ten yards from it at any time when I was not in school.

What I thought of today was not so much how the bike looked, or how it felt to ride it, or a mental panorama of curbs jumped and wheelies popped and skriiiiiippy coaster-brake heart-pounding stops. No, what I thought of today for the first time in countless days was how it felt to mount the bike.

There it stood, leaning against the kickstand, the front tire turned perpendicular to the frame. Here I came at a trot, eager to get somewhere in particular. Grab the handlebars, stand the bike up straight, the kickstand coming off the ground. My right foot swung to the left, crossing over my left foot, then scythed to the right, the blade of my shoe striking the light metal rod, snapping the kickstand up and into its locked position. Step onto the left pedal with my left foot while pushing off with my right. Left pedal barely skimming the ground as I hoisted my weight onto it, swung my right leg up over the seat, and my skinny butt plunking down into the saddle of the banana seat. Right leg pumped down hard to get the momentum going, and I was G-O-N gone.

Sometimes the part between pushing off was extended, with me standing on the left pedal, pulling that exquisite act of balance that childhood gifts a boy, just gliding for a few yard like a trick rider before finally mounting the bike in full. When I learned to ride a horse as an adult, I remember the muscle memory of stepping into that left stirrup and bringing my right leg up and over, and I was eight years old again, half-expecting to stand in that one stirrup and let the horse glide on down the road for a few yards, but I had by that time both an Adams apple and a beard, along with a healthy appreciation for the fragility of my own body when attached to a half-ton of mercurial horseflesh.

I cannot remember what happened to my bike. Perhaps I gave it away when I reached a certain age. Perhaps my mother kept it for a while, with so many of my other things, and finally got rid of it. I cannot remember the last time I was on a bicycle. I cannot remember what my friends’ bikes looked like.

But I can remember what it felt like to mount that blue bike in one clean motion, and how it felt to stand up on the pedals and look around the street, and how my hand would twist the handlebar grip like a motorcycle throttle, and the easy violence of reversing direction on the pedals, which engaged the brake, which stopped the bike more effectively than any hand brake ever could, and produced a delicious s-shaped sideways wiggling slide when done on the proper pavement in proper conditions.

Real cowboys are loathe to dismount, feeling vulnerable and slow when walking. I was the same with my bike when I was eight years old and cotton-blonde and buggy-whip skinny and rushing towards the days that still surprise and sometimes dismay me. I sat on her to chat with pals, to drink a Coke, sometimes to read a comic book. My forearms bore the imprints of the handlebars where I would lean against then, watching a slow freight train move down the tracks on 4th Avenue. The first time I saw a 10-speed bicycle, with its curled rams-horn handlebars and garden hose-thin tires and tiny triangular seat, forcing the rider to hunch forward like a constipated greyhound, I thought it looked ridiculous. I never wanted one.

Perhaps I will never ride a bike again. But if I do, it will have normal tires, and a high frame which doesn’t require leaning forward, and it will have coaster brakes. I might even manage to sweep the kickstand out of the way in one smooth motion. To hope for a flawless running mount might be too much. Perhaps not, though.

~ S.K. Orr