I Want to Ride My Bicycle...

I can't remember exactly how I learned to ride a bike. I remember pedaling around for awhile on a small bike with training wheels, and how I was able to bike the length of our rather small backyard for the first time not long after the training wheels had been removed. I remember biking around on my cousin's BMX. I remember falls and scrapes, my brother's racing bike, and finally, my own mountain bike, which I bought upon graduating from high school, only to have stolen from me just before I graduated from college, but not before I'd eked six years of adventures and a good deal of mileage out of it.

But I can't for the life of me remember the process of learning to ride a bike. It's like, almost as soon as the training wheels were off, so was I.

But because I remember the bumps, bruises, skinned, bloody knees, a skinned, bloody calf, and even a nasty bump on my head (once), I have a vast reserve of patience for any child who wants to learn how to ride a bike, and fortunately I am now able to draw upon that reservoir when teaching my son to ride a bike. He's really quite a quick study and I've a feeling that before the month is through he'll be biking on his own quite a bit. That aside, there's something really special about sharing this experience with him; it's one of those things that I know I'll be proud of someday, part of the process in which I helped my son become a man, as syrupy as that sounds. I love teaching my kid how to bike, and paradoxically, just as most of me will swell with pride when he finally knows how, part of me will feel a little sad that he won't need my help anymore. Ah, the contradictions of parenthood.

Of course, even when he knows how to ride a bike, there'll still be the possibility of bumps, bruises and skinned knees and shins...I guess I'd better start buying knee and elbow pads (oh yeah, and a helmet, too)...