When I was a kid, my father tried to teach me how to do things. You know, the basics: How to ride a bike, fly a kite, tie my shoes and swim.
Either I wasn’t a particularly good student or by the time he got to son #4 his patience had simply worn thin. I think it could also have been that my dad wasn’t a very good teacher, at least when it came to certain life skills.
I didn’t actually learn how to swim until I was in 9th grade. My father didn’t teach me. I learned in PE class because Hazen had a pool, and it’s where we headed after football season. My father did try to teach me once, but I would have nothing of it.
I had seen him try to teach my next door neighbor Bob once. We had a small pool in the back yard, three feet deep and about 12 feet across. I remember my father holding Bob up in the pool. He was sprawled out prostrate, my father’s hands holding him up by the chest. Bob started to flail madly, following my dad’s instructions. He looked like a paddle wheeler in that pool, water going everywhere.
Then my dad let go of him. Bob stopped bobbing and sank right to the bottom of the pool, still flailing madly. By now he was totally freaked out, and once he finally figured out that he could simply stand up, he did, and then ran home bawling.
I wasn’t about to let my dad use me as his next guinea pig in the swimming lessons department.
He also didn’t do well in the shoe tying department. This wasn’t his fault. I was left handed and dad was right handed. He would show me the whole looping and wrapping machinations, but my brain couldn’t reverse it so it would work for a lefty. I didn’t learn how to tie my own shoe until third grade. My cousin Davy showed me one day at Kennydale Elementary. One time is all it took. He wasn’t that great of a teacher – he was left handed.
Kite flying was a much easier skill to learn, largely because the wind did all the work and it was regularly windy in Renton. I had a pretty basic kite that was, well, kite shaped. My brother Brian always preferred a box kite, because back then, like today, he was kind of a square box type of guy, at least compared to me.
My father did teach me how to ride a bike. But I can’t say it was a traditional teaching method. All my brothers already had bikes and they weren’t about to sacrifice theirs for my lessons, only to end up with them scratched and dinged.
We had some other bikes in the yard, castoffs from a different age. They weren’t so much bikes as they were skeletons, remnants of what were once probably fairly nice bikes.
Most of these were too large for me to handle. There was only one that was Robb sized. I’m still not sure why we just didn’t take the training wheels off my existing bike and used it. I guess the idea was that I could still ride my bike with them while I learned to ride a bonafide two wheeler using the practice bike.
The standard training method was for my dad to stand behind the bike. He would then yell at you to peddle with all your might. He would push you along until you hit a small slope in the yard, then let go.
His belief was that the speed alone would carry you on your way while you learned to balance on the bicycle. This was a pretty good plan, one that was a variation of the Teach Bob to Swim Method my father had try to perfect back when we had the above ground pool.
On my first day of training, I was filled with trepidation. It wasn’t any lack of confidence that I had in my own skills. I had a lack of confidence in the bike my dad had found for me.
I had already seen it, but thought perhaps my dad would make some improvements to it to make it ready for training. By improvements I mean putting pedals on it and perhaps changing the flat tires.
But these were obviously luxuries that we couldn’t afford. The bulk of the pedals had already rusted away, leaving only the post in the middle. The tires were as flat as can be, so I was only riding on the rims.
While this gave me additional stability, due to the wider footprint on the surface, it gave me much less speed. If you’ve ever tried to pedal a bike with two flats you know that speed is not an option.
So there I was, ready to give it a go. My dad signaled for me to peddle like mad, which I did. He ran behind me, one step, two. I fell over. I got up and did it again. And fell over. Perhaps 10 more times, not even making it to the small slope. Finally, I made it to the slope and picked up speed. Well, I can’t say it was speed really. Inertia is more like it.
Woohoo! I was riding a bike. What I hadn’t noticed was that my dad was still with me, holding onto the seat. It turns out I wasn’t really riding at all, only because his ring had gotten stuck in the spring of the seat. He was trying to keep his finger from being torn off.
I eventually did learn to ride that dreaded flat tired bike. It was a big moment in my life. And, for my birthday, I got my very first new two wheeler. I can still remember it parked in the entryway of our house, glistening red and white, with tassels hanging from the handlebars.
But I didn’t get to take it out for a spin that day. Or for another week. Typical of Seattle, it rained on my birthday. But I don’t think I got off the bike for more than five minutes in the entryway, dreaming of my first exciting ride on two inflated tires.
Out on the Treasure Coast, wondering if I should go for a ride today – I see the tires on my bike are flat,
– Robb