I’ve owned three bikes in my life.
My father bought one of them. The worst one, of course. That “of course” isn’t really fair. I mean he barely knew me. How could he know what I wanted?
My relationship with my father, as I’ve said before, was mostly transactional. Just a few minutes of talking before money changed hands. And then he was gone. I don’t remember, but at some point I must have said that I wanted a bike. I would have been ten years old or so.
And, one day, he bought me one.
Prior to that, I’d owned another bike. A Huffy BMX. Great bike. But I hadn’t owned it long before someone stole it from my yard. It was that kind of neighborhood, though I guess opportunists live in lots of neighborhoods.
It would have been a late spring or early summer day. I came home to find it in the living room. “Your daddy came by,” my mother said.
We stared at it together.
It was a monstrosity.
A black, 3-speed “bus” as we called such bikes back then. It didn’t have a basket on the front for the flowers you’d picked up from market, but it did have the attachments for it.
It was the first actual “thing” that my father had ever bought me. He’d gone to the store and picked it out. Then he’d wrestled it out of his car…
