It wasn't much, just an old bicycle made from several older bicycles. It was like a hand-me-down bike from people I never met. Daddy baught it for me one day at a garage sale and I was crazy about it! My very own bicycle! My brother had worked odd jobs to purchase his bike. A cool blue one with the banana seat and hand brakes! It was awesome! Mine had the banana seat but lacked the hand brakes. Not a problem. Now we'd be able to ride together, and man did we ever?! I painted mine black with a can of spray paint, and even though the paint job was not perfect I didn't care. It didn't make a difference in "the way it ran"!
Together we rode. We rode around and through the neighborhood. We rode to the Handy Dandy Grocery about a mile from our house. We rode with the kids, Billy and Anita, from one neighborhood over. We rode with John, the kid next door who's dad seemed able to fix any and every problem with our bikes. In the summers we rode with the kids who came to stay with our neighbor Mrs. King. Simply put...We. Had. Fun. Full speed we rode through alleyways and between houses. If you were a seasoned rider, like we were, you could ride full throttle down the road, hang a right at the Arnold's drive and blast through the low hanging limbs between their fence and their garage! We had a full two feet of space! We even formed a "biker club". We were, drumroll please..."Heck's Angels"! I don't know which of us came up with that, but it was the 60's so you have to overlook the ignorance!
Once my cousins came to spend a summer day with us. My brother challanged my cousin Becky to a race. He was on his and Becky rode mine. First one to the concrete slab on our oil top road wins! I, along with my other cousin, stood at the slab slash finish line and yelled "GO!" The race was on and it was a close one! My brother won...sort of. He reached the slab a second or two before Becky but in doing so he hit a one inch rise in the edge of the concrete. He and the bicycle were launched high in the air. They flew over our heads and landed about ten feet beyond the other edge of the slab. We went home, broken arm and twisted metal and all to report the accident to my aunt who was babysitting the lot of us. She was asleep and rather than wake her, we walked to my mother's office about a block away. Off we went to the ER! Mama was MAD, to say the least. Not at us. She was mad at my aunt. I didn't blame my aunt. It was us who decided to race. If anyone was at fault it was us, and I really don't see a case to be made for that. The arm was in a cast for about a month or two then all was well. John's dad fixed the bike and we rode again like nothing ever happened. For the record, that was the first, last, and ONLY race we ever had!
Time passed and the bicycles gave way to cars. Billy got into motorcycles and rode a chopper for a few years until he accidentally drowned at 18 on a family outing. I lost track of the rest of the kids.
Those were the days. I wish I had kept that old bike. I really wish we could have kept riding and being kids.
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