The old adage about never forgetting after learning how to ride a bike is pure hokum, and this grandpa is living proof.
On a camping trip this fall with grandsons Barrett (4) and Easton (5), I climbed aboard my daughter-in-law’s girlie bike—the robin’s egg blue cruiser outfitted with a cute basket that is perfect for holding…I dunno…kewpie dolls or friendship bracelets or other sugar-and-spice paraphernalia.
About three feet into my wobbly peddling it struck me that I could not remember the last time I had been on a bicycle. After giving it some thought, I pegged the year to be 1981. I won’t bore you with the comical, look-out-for-that-tree details of our ride over hill and over dale (poor Dale) through the campground that day.
The experience reminded me that Barrett and Easton are born-to-ride daredevils when it comes to two-wheeled action. Not 10 days after the training wheels came off Barrett’s bike he was already flying along the Wabash Trace Trail over in Iowa on one of the popular Taco Rides, and his family has since taken 10-mile jaunts along other, sometimes more challenging trails while crisscrossing the metro.
The thought of which is all absolutely horrifying to me.
And doubly so for my wife, Julie. When we let our imaginations get the best of us, life as grandparents can be a pins-and-needles game of waiting for that inevitable phone call from my son or daughter-in-law where we are informed, “Well, just thought we’d tell you that we’re on our way to the emergency room.”
That’s where this story was supposed to end. Sure, I would have yammered on for a paragraph or three on the terrors of being the grandpa of two young, adventurous boys who don’t know the meaning of fear…but that was going to be pretty much it. Column done. Over. See ya next issue.
Except that we did, in fact, get that phone call.
One week to the day after my tottering bike ride inspired this column, Barrett did a face-plant onto the pavement off his otherwise trusty steed. Yes, he was wearing a helmet, as always, but he knocked out three front teeth, and his bruised and bloodied face looked like a punch-drunk Robert Ne Niro in Raging Bull.
My son, Eric, was a BMX rebel in his teen years, and I recall holding my breath (thank goodness for a gold-plated medical plan) every time that starter gate dropped with a clang and a quartet of riders hurtled toward certain doom. That was at the bicycle track down in Lincoln but now, a generation later, Omaha has a BMX death trap of its own.
And Eric’s reaction to the events of last weekend? He plans to have Barrett fitted with a new mouthguard before going airborne for the first time in a gravity-defying ride on and over the dirt moguls of the local track. All before my grandson’s fat lip is even given a chance to recede to its former pretty-boy profile.
God help us all.
