Do You Remember Your Bicycle

Not that fifteen-speed, lighter than a pigeon egg, million-dollar, gay as Liberace racing bike with metal-flake paint but the bicycle you had as a kid and you only wanted that single gear because you knew those three-gear English bicycles with the 'transmission' in the hub of the wheel never worked for long.  Ten-speed bicycles were only for the kids whose parents wanted everyone else to hate them.

Note:  we didn't hate them but we definitely thought they were 'putting on airs.'


The bicycle had to have 28-inch wheels because, of course, 26-inch wheels were for girls, man.  Ray Bradbury wrote a short story way back about "The Sound of Summer Running" and it was all about a pair of sneakers.  They were damn sure not the high-dollar Adidas running shoes but sneakers a kid wears everywhere.  He jumps in puddles with them or anything he likes and often his name is written in big letters on the sides of them so they don't get lost in gym class.

It wasn't too cool to wear your gym sneakers to regular classes but it didn't matter much and people would just roll it off to I guess he doesn't have much money and it would roll on past.  I gather a kid would burn before doing that today and that's a damn shame, ain't it.

Sometimes salesmen would surprise and not always well by greeting Mother by name.  Mother was mystified until the salesman nodded wisely toward the shoes.  That might not have surprised an American Mother so much but for my ol' Mother it was a magic trick.


This was back when parents weren't so pretentious and it kind of wasn't cool to have iron-on patches on your blue jeans but it didn't matter much.  It was also common to see kids with their jeans rolled up from the ankles because mother knew the kid would grow into them if he didn't blow out the knees or the ass of them first.

Swanky clothes didn't matter much in a small town and hopefully still don't.  Having a working bicycle mattered a lot although friends would double you on their bicycles some of the time.  It was kind of cool doing that too even when it's a lot more work but you're a kid and you don't care about the work of it that much.  Davis was mostly level farmland so it wasn't that much work anyway.

Riding like that was kind of chummy but you're young and gay / straight matters are off in the distance somewhere.  You don't know of such things and you're just kids riding around on a Summer day because Bill said he caught a snake in his backyard and he wants everyone to come over to look at it.

Bicycles would end up all over the front yard of Bill's parents' place but they were hardly ever stolen as this was closer to country than city even when Sacramento was only about thirteen miles or twenty kilometers away.  Things were not the same in Sacto and it was growing into the problems which came to all the cities.  Davis was a university town inside a farming community and it was somewhat remote to most people.


One of the best rides was out to Putah Creek and parents didn't want anyone going out there because there was no possible way to find anyone.  There were stories of dead bodies and fecal products floating in the water but we never saw anything like that and there was the most hellacious rope swing in the Universe out there.

That swing was tied high up a tree so it was necessary to drag it way up the bank of the river and the higher you went showed who had the big balls, see (larfs).

You would swing way out over the river to let go well up in the air for the supreme flight and splash into the water.  This was all the grandeur a kid ever needs and I have GOT to do that again.

I never did see a dead body although sometimes someone would call out I see one.  There would be gathering to review, what do you think.  Is it a body (larfs).


This gets like a Norman Rockwell painting on a Saturday Evening Post cover for something which makes people wistful but will never see and may never have seen.  You can see in Pokemon Go how much kids want it rather than jacking around with each other electronically.

City kids may not have ever known or at least not the same way.  In a small town, your bicycle is your first friend because it's freedom.  Now you have wheels and no-one ever heard of a cellphone.  Once you roll out of sight, you are invisible.  That glorious freedom was such a wonderful thing and you do know the sound of Summer rolling because these tires weren't inflated hard as a rock like racing bikes and you could feel if they were running a little low on air.  Small towns are quiet and you can certainly hear those tires rolling.  That may be the first clue on them on losing air when you don't like the sound of how it rides.


So, let's talk about what money buys, shall we?

(Ed:  are you going to get cynical?)

Last thought I have and that was just a light joke because no amount of money can buy freedom like that.  It's back on that Saturday Evening Post cover but you can still look at it.