“The first grip I ever got on things
Was when I learnt the art of pedaling
(By hand) a bike turned upside down, and drove
its back wheel preternaturally fast.”

~ from Wheels within Wheels by SEAMUS HEANEY

It’s Father’s Day—it’s a big deal. In a recent survey,  the National Retail Foundation found that 76 percent of Americans plan to celebrate it. That celebration will look different for all of us. Scrolling through social media, my feed is already lit up with photos of fathers – including my own – all poignant reminders that my daughter has been without her dad for some of the biggest moments of her life, the moments that don’t happen on Father’s Day.  It feels unfair. We can’t dodge it of course. On the one hand, we celebrate my dad, her grandfather—grateful for the fatherly people in our lives. On the other, the day is a keen reminder that my daughter’s father is physically not here.

The list of milestones continues to grow, the stuff of Hallmark greeting cards and scrapbooks and Facebook memories. He has missed so much—her graduations and her first real job and the first time she pored over a ballot and voted in a Presidential election for the candidate that might deliver the kind of America he had dreamed would be hers. He missed meeting her boyfriend, a gentle soul with hair as long as his used to be and a vinyl record collection and who studies archeology—the subject he once told me he would study in his next life.  He missed hearing all about her Senior trip to the Galapagos Islands—the only destination on a bucket-list of places he would have loved to see before he died. He also 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 my daughter took me for a drive. My father, far from rural Derry, had been teaching her to drive on what he considered the wrong side of the road. Watching from 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, he encouraged her  to “go easy,” to just believe in herself in a way I don’t recall from my driving lessons with him on the Dublin Road in the late 1970s.

Watching from our door as she proceeded west on Montebello Avenue, maintaining a slow and steady 25 mph, I was transported from adolescence remembered into motherhood and widowhood. Unaware and seemingly unafraid behind the wheel, my girl was stoic, reminding me then and today of Seamus Heaney’s 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.

When I’m in Phoenix these days, she drives me to places I miss—Target, the bookstore, and her favorite antique store. One morning, as she signaled and turned right onto the highway, I was reminded of a milestone morning in our favorite park—the one where she and her dad regularly fed two bad-tempered geese they had christened “Fight and Bite,” the one where he removed the training wheels from the pink bicycle she got for Christmas that year, and let her go for the first time. It was one of the many lessons in love that have stayed with her.

Life is about trust and balance. Riding a bike requires both, without either you can’t ride.

~ Nikki Giovanni

Cute and cozy in her new aran sweater, she opts for a grin for the camera, having lost both front teeth just in time for Christmas. Santa did well, having delivered a pink bicycle exactly as described in her note to him. For good measure, he even added sparkling streamers. Before I’m taken to task about reinforcing gender stereotypes, pink was her favorite color that year. She had whispered to the mall Santa that if it wasn’t too much trouble he could maybe bring “rosy pink wind chimes to make me feel happy like the sunset’s glow.” By the following Christmas, she had moved on. She wanted only a new bike to ride with daddy, and the color was irrelevant.

The pink bike had training wheels—”stabilizers” as we called them when I was a child. Stabilizers. It was my first big word. Even now, I like saying it and conjuring all it connotes—stability, steadfastness, balance, a firm hold.

Had I read MIT engineering professor David Gordon Wilson’s Bicycling Science, I may not have been so adamant about getting a bike with stabilizers for my daughter. Professor Wilson handily dismisses them, pointing out what is now obvious – that they do not teach you how to balance; they teach you how to pedal.

Bicycling is the quintessential balancing act and it 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.” No wonder we are so afraid when we push off that first time without training wheels – immediately, we have to learn how to balance, just as we are expected to swim if we are thrown in the deep end.

But if we get rid of the training wheels, we also say goodbye to a rite of passage, a milestone.  In our family’s story, it was A Big Moment. The morning began with an Irish breakfast—sausages, butter, and bacon purchased from Pat McCrossan at an Irish gift shop in Phoenix.  A Derry native, he winked at Sophie and  made a joke about how he had given her ma the Protestant discount.

Next on our agenda was the removal of the training wheels. Waiting as her dad fumbled with the wrench that would remove forever the useless stabilizers, our girl was confident that those training wheels had prepared her to ride a bike. Unconvinced, we had brought band-aids along with a video camera to 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 once and with only a few tears, and our darling girl kept both nerve and balance when she climbed on again. And then she was doing it—riding a bike. Round and round the park, sunbeams dancing on silver spokes, blue and white streamers flashing from the handlebars, ducks and geese scrambling to get out of her path, and our girl, buoyant in what Heaney calls the “new momentum,” equipped for bicycle riding, for inevitable tumbles and the promise of a blue skies ahead. Just like her mother.

And what is a bicycle? It is trust and balance, and that’s what love is. Love is trust and balance.