Just like riding a bike
Mom ran along beside me with one hand on the seat as I gathered speed on my blue two-wheeler with the chrome fenders and the wire basket. No training wheels - this was the 70s.
The summer before, I was still using my trike with its bike front wheel and two tiny ones at the back, tippy as hell but fun in its own way. But this bike felt like the big-league, one step closer to a drivers licence. Country living made you covet that at a much younger age.
I’d already fallen again and again, grinding gravel into my tender white May skin, but mom and I both knew with each fall, I got closer to achieving the speed and the balance necessary to stay upright. That day, when my speed exceeded mom’s ability to run and she let go, I flew down the gentle hill towards the road, screaming and laughing all at once. I don’t remember whether my stop was abrupt or gentle but I do remember her letting go. Some moments you just never forget.
I spent much of my childhood cycling down back roads with my friends, bandaids often flapping from our knees, but delighting in the thrill of wind whizzing through our hair. As a tween, I traded in my little blue & white job for a 10-speed, entirely impractical for gravel but coveted in the 1980s with its turned-under handlebars and skinny, fenderless tires. I was 14 before I ever rode on asphalt.
I had a taste of that feeling of freedom this week when, after 10 years of being bike-less, I exchanged my adult tricycle for a second-hand two wheeler. Oh, the trike was fun in its own way and it looked beautiful but it weighed a ton and took up a lot of real estate for my new small-house life. I put it on Facebook Marketplace, sold it in two days to a woman my age who’d never learned to ride a bike. With some of the proceeds, I picked up an old-fashioned-looking ladies bike.
Although helmets have ruined that feeling in my hair, I felt the cool breeze on my face as I tooled around the quiet streets of Weston. There’s not much left of that farmgirl flying fearlessly over gravel. I’m a bit wobbly and weeks from feeling confident on roads with actual traffic but it felt terrific!
It got me thinking about the things we can do that we take for granted. The list is different for everyone. Bike-riding is the only essential childhood physical activity I really got the hang of. I still would be hard pressed to hit a ball with a bat, or, truth be told, even catch the ball; the only thing that would save me from drowning in a capsizing situation is if the floating qualities of fat were stronger than my ability to thrash in a panic; don’t ask me to serve a volleyball; and my adult ice-skating is best left untested for fear of hip-breaking. My formative years were not wasted — I can knit, read music, parse a sentence, make bread, and kick many asses at Scrabble.
But it’s bike-riding that you never question: if you learned to cycle as a kid, you will always be able to. It’s just, well, like riding a bike!
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Writing this made me wonder - is the idiom “just like riding a bike” translated literally to other languages? That is, does the idea that bike-riding is a skill, once learned, that is not easily dislodged, work for other cultures too? Please answer if you can shed light in your language. If it’s not the same, I’m interested to know the literal translation of your language’s expression! Sigh - I’m such a nerd.
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