I had a great bike when I was a child. It was a Huffy with a blue glittery banana seat with a sissy bar, and blue and white streamers from the handles. Sometimes I used a white wicker basket to bring bread home from the store. Riding a bike was hard on my street. I grew up on a red dirt road. The road grader would scrape the street and make a ridge on either side. Getting over that ridge on a bicycle was like jumping a storm ditch. If I wasn’t really careful my wheels would get stuck and I would end up in a twisted heap in the sand. I spent a lot of my childhood with my legs covered in pinkish red globs of Metholade. I don’t really know what was in that stuff, but my mother put it on every scrape, cut, or bruise.
For a while my father worked at the DuPpont plant in Wilmington, so we would spend the summer at Wilmington Beach (between Carolina Beach and Kure Beach). He had bought a small lot about three blocks from the ocean and put a two bedroom house trailer on it. I hated going to that trailer. Most kids would have loved it, but not me. My brothers are so much older than me that it was a lot like being an only child. I really had nothing to do. We seldom went down to the ocean because my mother and I didn’t know how to swim. Reading comic books and riding my bike were my only entertainment. I loved riding my bike there because the streets were paved.
For some reason my mother believes that I was not good at riding a bike. I guess she thinks this because of the frequent wipe outs I had in the sand. Sometimes in conversation my mother (randomly) will say, “you never could ride a bike.” This cracks Nick up, so when I’m feeling a little high and mighty, he likes to repeat her mantra. That brings me down to earth in a flash. I wonder whatever happened to that bike?
For a while my father worked at the DuPpont plant in Wilmington, so we would spend the summer at Wilmington Beach (between Carolina Beach and Kure Beach). He had bought a small lot about three blocks from the ocean and put a two bedroom house trailer on it. I hated going to that trailer. Most kids would have loved it, but not me. My brothers are so much older than me that it was a lot like being an only child. I really had nothing to do. We seldom went down to the ocean because my mother and I didn’t know how to swim. Reading comic books and riding my bike were my only entertainment. I loved riding my bike there because the streets were paved.
For some reason my mother believes that I was not good at riding a bike. I guess she thinks this because of the frequent wipe outs I had in the sand. Sometimes in conversation my mother (randomly) will say, “you never could ride a bike.” This cracks Nick up, so when I’m feeling a little high and mighty, he likes to repeat her mantra. That brings me down to earth in a flash. I wonder whatever happened to that bike?
0 comments:
Post a Comment