Learning to ride a bike.

From my first bike to owning two.

It started in a tennis court, on a ten speed Norco. I was twelve, and it was my first bike. We lived at the top of a long hill and that’s how long it took for my mother to insist we learn to ride bicycles, not just motorbikes.

Eventually letting go of the back of the seat, my father sat in the centre of the tennis court. Around. Around. “Go the other way, you’re making me dizzy.” Boredom evident.

I’m not sure we rode them much, but my younger sister and I took them camping, occasionally to friends houses, but never up the driveway. It was too steep. You pushed it up, and flew down the hill, just about everyone else lived at the bottom. Mom would pick you up.

Nearly twenty years later, with a few bikes in between, along came a pearl yellow beach cruiser. It’s heavy, long, and I wasn’t even sure I liked it at first. I’m fairly certain I bought it because I felt bad for the 100lb. “kid” (I was probably six years older than him) who travelled by commuter train and wet roads to get to me. He was soaking wet and “Couldn’t afford to keep it”. It was $400 and there was only one other like it in Vancouver.

It came to the beach, to San Diego, Palm Springs and eventually Victoria. It spent time in storage, locked to a flagpole at a marina one summer, was pecked at by birds, and is often photographed by strangers. It started more conversations in Vancouver than anything I’d seen.

Then I moved to an island, a city without a seawall, and met a man with a dozen bikes. He looks sheepishly away if you ask him, and doesn’t count the ones in the garage or that his son has commandeered.

One summer day his son, a competitive road and track cyclist, says “Dad let’s weigh it.” A bathroom scale and a laughing teenager confirmed it. Forty-five pounds I’d been lugging up stairs, riding up hills, and dragging from city to city. But strangers wave. They say hello. And you can’t ride this bike without a smile on your face.

Then I fell in love. And bought another bike.