I guess it's like that every year. With the first hint of decent weather, you just can't keep the kids from hauling their Christmas presents out into the street for a quick pedal around the block. At least I know I was that way.
I remember the first bike I got for Christmas; it was only my second bicycle and I was in the second grade. We were living in Chicago at the time, and the ground was covered with at least 8 inches of the frozen white stuff.
"Pleeeze?" I begged my parents, "can't I pleeze take my new bike out and ride it?"
"No, absolutely not," my father ordered. "Fer cryin' out loud, Gary, the streets are covered with snow and you'd slip and fall down the first time you tried to turn it."
"But the snow's packed down in the center of the streets," I reasoned. "I'll be careful and I won't go fast." Yeah, sure.
My new bike that year was maroon with chrome fenders, and in spite of being made by Schwinn, it was of the style, I thought, of a "real" English racer.
It had skinny tires (my old bike had mammoth balloon tires, and I just knew that this new one would be faster), and it was also the first bike I'd ever ridden with more than one speed. It had to be faster.
It was also the first bike I'd ever been astride that featured hand brakes.
"No!" my father said quite firmly. "You're not taking that new bike out in the snow and that's it - period. If you don't quit whining about it, I'm going to lock up the bike and you won't get to ride it until school's out for the summer.
"You can take it down in the basement if you've gotta try riding it that bad."
"OK," I retreated. "Will you help me carry it down the stairs?"
We carried my new bike down into the basement, and I commenced to clear out a path down the long side of the basement, around the furnace and then back past my mom's dryer and washing machines. My route ended up looking like a straight with two hairpin curves at each end and then around a dogleg turn on each lap.
I mounted up and set out on my first ride around the basement. On my second lap, as I was trying to dodge one of the metal posts that were spaced about every 20 feet, I found myself heading straight into a pile of empty cardboard boxes.
Quickly, I momentarily reversed my forward pedaling and then remembered that these brakes didn't work that way. I hurriedly squeezed the hand brakes, but it was too late and I was already crashing into the boxes.
"You all right down there?" came my father's voice down the basement stairs as he inquired about the muffled crash he'd just heard.
"Yeah," I called out as I tried to extract both myself and my new bike from the mound of crumpled cardboard. "These hand brakes are going to take a little getting used to."
"Just imagine what it could have been like," Dad continued after he came bounding down the stairs, "if you had been out on slippery snow. Instead of a pile of empty boxes, you could have crashed into a tree, or you could be looking at the bottom of some car right now."
This, of course, was way before the advent of bicycle safety helmets, and that's possibly even a good thing. Who knows what I might have tried? Knowing my second-grade mindset, the only people who wore helmets then were either football players and race-car drivers, and I thought they were invincible.
Years later, when I was a sophomore in high school, I got my last Christmas bicycle.
This one was an honest-to-God, French 10-speed lightweight, with ram's-horn handlebars, high air-pressure tires and a totally uncomfortable saddle. I was living in California then, and this time I didn't have to wait for the snow to melt before I made any speed runs around the block.
"Why were you just sitting in the middle of the lawn just now," my father asked after I had come in from my first ride on my new 10-speed.
"I don't feel so good," I replied as I fought the nausea from the overexertion, "and I thought I had better just sit down and take a rest."
"How hard did you ride your new bike?"
"As fast as I could make it go."
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