From the time I was six or seven until I was ten or eleven, I rode a lovely, red banana seat bike with foot brakes. It had a red-and-white striped basket that strapped to the handlebars and served well to hold interesting rocks, the detonated fireworks my brother and I would scavenge for on the morning after the 4th of July, and various and sundry other interesting objects you could find on the way home from school or on your way to the pool. We spent a lot of hours together, that bike and I.
(Yes, yes. That is me, sporting a velour v-neck sweater and ridiculously short shorts on my awesome red bike.)
One significant memory I have with this bike involved the most blatant act of disobedience my brother and I ever committed together. He had, one day, inadvertently left his bike lock too loose around the seat of his bike on our way home and the chain on the lock dangled in his spokes and made a terrific clicking noise. I promptly hopped off my bike, adjusted my lock until it was dangling just so, and we clicked and clanged all the way home. Upon our arrival, our mother discovered our new breakthrough and plainly told us that it was dangerous to dangle our locks in the spokes and we were not to do it anymore. The next day, we biked a ¼ mile from home, dismounted our bikes, adjusted the chains and went on our way. After school and on the way home, ¼ mile from home, we would adjust the locks in full belief that so long as mom didn’t know what we were doing, all would be well. This worked splendidly until a few days later when I was beebopping along with a loudly clacking bike lock when it lodged in my spokes, stopped the wheel suddenly, and flipped the bike over and I skidded onto the pavement—knees-first. I quickly examined the bike, saw several bent spokes and burst into tears, not because of the damaged bike, or because of the profusely bleeding gashes on my legs, but because we were about to get in the biggest kind of Cabbage trouble: Disobedience. I cried while we walked our bikes all the way home and we didn’t get to ride for the next 2 weeks. Torture to a seven-year-old! But, lesson learned.
After the retirement of the red banana seat bike a couple of years later, my favorite bike to ride was my Mom’s bike and I will tell you why. She had a couch seat. Seriously, the thing was ginormous and cushy and so comfortable. I’d ride around the neighborhood perched on that heavenly seat impervious to bumps, ruts, and washboard roads. In fact, when I got ye old Royce Union, I took the seat from my mom’s long-since-regularly-used granny bike and attached it to my spiffy new mountain bike and enjoyed years of painless rides.
Which brings me to the real reason for my post today. I’m in the market for a new bike. I have gone to the local bike shop and test-rode a number of bikes and have had a realization. The pursuit of finding the right bike is very much akin to Ollivander’s quest, in Harry Potter, to match the right wand with the right witch or wizard. As Ollivander points out, “it’s really the wand that chooses the wizard.” And so it is with bicycles, I have found. I noticed that I can get on a bike and within the first two rotations of the pedals, know it is not the bike for me. The handlebars are too far away or the seat leans me too far back or my feet don’t feel secure on the pedals or the steering is a little shaky or my knees feel like they’re going to hit my arms or…it’s just not right. And then, THEN, you get on the bike that makes you feel like you’ve come home after all these years to your red banana seat bike with the red-and-white striped basket tied to the handlebars. That’s the bike I’m looking for. And I think I’ve found it. This is what it looks like.
Fantastic, eh?
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