When I was a child, I had a love-hate relationship with my little pink bicycle. I loved it, but I’m pretty sure that it hated me.
I’d been riding it with the training wheels on for a while, but my friends had all graduated to the freedom of no training wheels on their bikes. Thus, it was time for mine to come off, too. I don’t recall if I wanted them off or if my parents insisted that I was too old for training wheels, but for whichever of those reasons, the training wheels came off.
And the era of me falling down a lot began.
Balance and I have never been good buddies. Even today, despite morning yoga exercises for the past five years, I have a hell of a time doing the tree pose for more than a fast count of twenty! Thus, as a child missing her faithful training wheels to help her balance on her bike, the pavement and I became the buddies that balance and I never will be.
My parents each took turns holding onto the back of my banana seat and running alongside me as I swerved and veered like a drunk after a good bender. They’d run out of breath and release me, thinking I seemed to be getting the knack of it, only to watch me plummet to earth in a few seconds.
Not to be deterred — because I’m very stubborn and I get really pissy when I can’t figure things out that others seem to do with ease — I began practicing on my own each day, determined to master the art of riding a bike. I decided that for my own safety, I should stay out of the street while I worked on becoming proficient.
Little did I know that there was an evil presence lurking along the sidewalk in the form of a large, red fire hydrant!
The image above is the epitome of evil to me. You see, during the summers of my youth I never — well, extremely rarely at any rate — wore shoes. Even today I prefer to be barefoot all the time. Thus, on my attempts to improve my balance while riding my bike, I was also shoeless.
What does that have to do with an evil, red fire hydrant, you may be wondering. Well, that fire hydrant was about one house down from my own, and I preferred to ride in that direction because the other direction held the neighborhood bully and his evil tactics to push me off my bike. So, as I would make my wobbly, two-wheeled way down the sidewalk, ultimately I would wander off the paved path and crash into the fire hydrant.
Every. Single. Time.
And pretty much every time I ran into that monstrosity, I would cut my foot on those giant, metal bolts sticking out of it — it became my own Frankenstein’s monster!
Naturally, my mother told me repeatedly to “Put on some damn shoes!” but I was a typical kid who never listened to her mother, and I was stubborn, so after she patched me up for the umpteenth time, I’d get back on my bike and wobble down the sidewalk again, only to be attacked — AGAIN — by that damn fire hydrant.
Eventually, though, I did figure it all out and enjoyed the freedom that comes from being able to ride a bike all over the neighborhood and beyond. I do believe that’s where my love of motorcycle riding began — with that feeling of freedom that you feel when new roads open before you and you have a vehicle that can take you down them much more quickly than your own feet can.
I am getting closer to releasing my fifth novel, “Trouble on Tybee,” and I shared the beginning of that book with my entry here about “Puzzles.” Once I have that out — hopefully in November — I will then turn to completing one of the other novels I’ve started. That will either be the one about the comedy club, or it will be the one about a lady who buys a motorcycle and then learns some things about its previous owner, a man who died under suspicious circumstances.
I am including the rough-draft beginning of that story below for my paid subscribers. If you are not yet a subscriber, please consider becoming one.
Thanks.
Tammy Marshall
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