“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. The plan was to visit our favorite park, where she would ride her bike without training wheels for the first time. Officially “A Big Moment” in our family’s story, the morning began with “the full Irish,” having scored some sausages and bacon from Pat McCrossan at the long-gone Irish gift shop in Phoenix. A Derry native, he reminded me with a wind that he had given the Protestant discount, before sending me on my way with a bag of Tayto cheese and onion. 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.
Skipping around us impatiently, in a new sweater that reminded me of my mother’s knitting, and her braided pig-tails, she had no doubt that those training wheels had prepared her to ride a bike. She would only grin for the camera, having lost her two front teeth just in time for Christmas. Santa had done well, delivering the very 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 deliver “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).
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 soon she 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.” She was now equipped for bicycle riding, forever, and waiting in the wings, were two parents ready to catch her. Two parents – her safe place to fall . . .
It is beyond her grasp that this is yet another 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 – and there are more to come. There was her graduation from high school and college, 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,” and he would be dismayed by how that election turned out. He missed the first time she got behind the wheel of a car, his car. And, she missed him.
It was on our 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 our 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 on the roads of Northern Ireland in the late 1970s.
Out of the corner of my eye, I watch as she signals before turning onto the highway, taking me from adolescence remembered into motherhood and widowhood. She is unaware and unafraid. She has taken the wheel. She belongs with the boys who have taken the kite in the Heaney poem. She is fit for it.
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.
Sometimes I wish he could visit her for a moment, the way the dead dad returns in the movies, a wise ghost with just enough time to tell her the one thing he wants to make sure she knows – that it’s just like riding a bicycle, that she must believe in herself and the promise of blue skies ahead and inevitable tumbles around the corner. Because as Nikki Giovannini says of bicycles:
Because love requires trust and balance.
Living requires trust and balance. 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.
