One Christmas Morning
I was probably six or seven when I woke up on Christmas morning to a shiny new bike next to the Christmas tree. I’d never seen anything like this bike before. A Schwinn with a banana seat and huge chrome hanger handle bars. It was awesome. I was now a BIG fan of Santa.
As an only child of two middle class parents (one in nonprofit and the other a packaging technician) I had little understanding of socioeconomic status, but I knew our tiny house looking straight out at all six or eight lanes of the MacArthur Freeway about 400 feet away was not posh. But it was a great dead-end street to ride bikes on.
I may have had a bike before the mighty Schwinn, but I don’t remember it as anything special. At my first opportunity on Christmas morning I took my new bike outside and, with my parents watching on, started riding down the street. I turned around to wave a triumphant signal that all was right in the world… and side swipped a yellow VW Microbus and crashed to the asphalt. Thankfully there was no damage to me or the bus (which belonged to my Aunt that lived across the street) and I was up and riding immediately. This officially began my love of riding bikes.
I rode that bike a lot. I remember being at a friends house and we’d set up a jump on the sidewalk. I got up a lot of speed, but apparently I didn’t fully understand the dynamics of how to jump yet as I stayed a little too far forward, and ended up on my face sliding down the sidewalk with the bike being hurtled above and beyond me. Nothing broken, but the surface damage was significant.
I don’t know where the Schwinn went, but when I was ten I convinced my parents to buy me a BMX bike with Tuffy Rims. It was a little over $200 and I was going to get a paper route to pay them back, and I did. I figured out how to tie the cloth bags to the handlebars and fill them with as many papers as possible. Sadly, The Daily Review out of Hayward is long gone, but it was a great job for a ten year old. Among my new friends at my new school and new house in Castro Valley, that bike was the bomb.
Another exciting thing happened when I was 10 and going to school in Castro Valley. My teacher must have decided I was doing well enough in class that I should participate in the “GATE” program. Basically a couple kids from each school would get bussed to one of the schools and we’d do something “GATEY” which never seemed too significant then, or in recalling it now… except this one girl.
She was like a bouncing spotlight of energy. She stood out on her own, but also had a twin sister. I don’t recall us talking, I imagine I stood to the side and just watched, like when you see a live performance of your favorite artist, I was just hoping to get some paint splattered on me. I was happy to just be in the same room.
Since then, there have been many different bikes that have carried me on adventures across the US and New Zealand (and Portugal in 2024!), but only one woman, and I’m always trying to catch some paint.
