“The first grip I ever got on things
Was when I learnt the art of pedalling
(By hand) a bike turned upside down, and drove
Its back wheel preternaturally fast.”
~ from Wheels within Wheels by SEAMUS HEANEY
My first bike arrived on Christmas morning, 1967. It had training wheels, or “stabilizers” as we called them in Northern Ireland. Stabilizers – my first big word. Even now, I like saying it and conjuring all it connotes – stability, steadfastness, balance – a firm hold. Perhaps had Santa Claus read MIT engineering professor David Gordon Wilson’s Bicycling Science, he may not have been so adamant about finding a bike with stabilizers. The professor dismisses training wheels entirely, pointing out the obvious – that they do not teach you how to balance; they teach you how to pedal. Given that bicycling is the quintessential balancing act, it indeed makes more sense to follow Wilson’s advice to “adjust the bicycle’s seat low enough for children to plant their feet on the ground and practice by coasting down the grassy slopes.” Little wonder we are so afraid when we push off that first time without training wheels. We have to learn how to balance, much like the way we are expected to swim if we are thrown in the deep end. But if we get rid of the training wheels, then we must say goodbye to a rite of passage . . .
A lifetime later, with a little girl of my own, one morning after Christmas shimmers in my memory. Her father and I had taken her to the park to ride her bike – without training wheels for the first time. Officially “A Big Moment” in our family’s story, the morning began with an Irish breakfast – sausages and bacon purchased from Pat McCrossan at an Irish gift shop in Phoenix. A Derry native, he joked about giving me the Protestant discount, before sending me on my way with a bag of Tayto. Next on our agenda was the removal of the training wheels. As expected there was some cursing and fumbling with the wrench that would remove forever the useless stabilizers.
Standing by impatiently, in a new sweater that reminded me of my mother’s knitting, and her pig-tails braided, she was confident that those training wheels had prepared her to ride a bike. She grins for the camera, having lost her two front teeth just in time for Christmas. Santa has done well, delivering the pink bicycle she wanted, complete with sparkling streamers. (Lest you judge me, gentle reader, about reinforcing gender stereotypes, our girl loved pink that year. In her letter to Santa, she even asked that he bring “pink wind chimes to make me feel happy like the sunset’s glow.” The next Christmas, she had moved on; she wanted a new bike to ride with daddy, and the color was irrelevant).
Older and wiser, we didn’t tell her we had brought band-aids along with the video camera that would record the moment. You know the one. Her father would run alongside the bike, holding onto the seat, and then let go as she rode into the afternoon sunshine . . .
Naturally, she lost her balance, and she fell. But only the once. She cried, too. Still, our darling girl kept both nerve and balance when she climbed on again. And soonshe was riding a bike! Round and round the park she rode, sunbeams dancing on silver spokes, blue and white streamers flashing from the handlebars, ducks and geese scrambling to get out of her path, and she, buoyant in what Heaney calls the “new momentum.” Equipped for bicycle riding. Forever. And waiting in the wings, two parents ready to catch her. Two parents A safe place to fall . . .
Her father was her first word. He picked her up from school every day and bought her ice cream every Friday afternoon. It is beyond her grasp that this is the fifth Father’s Day without him and that one day it will be ten years, twenty years, forty years, since he last held her hand in the frozen food section of the grocery store. To keep her warm. Much missed, he has missed too much and too many rites of passage. There was her graduation from high school, her first paycheck, the first time she voted in a Presidential election. He would have liked that she voted for the woman he thought would make “a damn fine President.” He missed her first boyfriend and the subsequent first heartbreak – probably a good thing. And, he missed the first time she got behind the wheel of a car, his car. And she missed him. It was on the first Christmas Day without him that our daughter took me for a drive. My father, a world away from rural south Derry, had been teaching her to drive on what he still considers the wrong side of the road. Every day, he sat in the passenger seat as his only granddaughter drove around the quiet streets of her Phoenix neighborhood, her elegant hands at ten-to-two on the steering wheel, encouraging her to “go easy” and to just believe in herself, in a way I don’t recall from my driving lessons with him on the roads around Antrim in the late 1970s. I almost burst with pride, looking on as she signaled and proceeded down the avenue, maintaining a slow, steady 25 mph and taking me from adolescence remembered into motherhood and widowhood, unaware and unafraid. Behind the wheel, my girl was stoic, reminding me of Seamus Heaney and the symbolic passing of a kite from father to sons in “A Poem for Michael and Christopher”
Before the kite plunges down into the wood
and this line goes useless
take in your two hands, boys, and feel
the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.
You were born fit for it.
Stand in here in front of me
and take the strain~ Take the strain. You are fit for it.
We are fit for it.
On a morning like this one, it is just the two of us in the car. She is driving me to the bank and then to the mechanic. Watching as she signals and turns right onto the highway, I am reminded again of that day long ago when her father took the training wheels off her bicycle, when he let her go for the first time, which in return reminds me of Nikki Giovannini on bicycles:
Because love requires trust and balance.
Living requires trust and balance.
Sometimes I wish he would come back for a moment, the way the dead dad returns in the movies, a wise ghost with just a little time to tell his daughter the one thing he wants to make sure she knows – that it’s just like riding a bicycle, to believe in herself and the promise of blue skies ahead and inevitable tumbles around the corner.
I’ll maybe pick up the phone and call my father – Perhaps the training wheels don’t come off quite yet.
Happy Father’s Day, da. I love you.
