Tags
developmental milestones, identity, Learning to drive, learning to ride a bike, Memoir, mother daughter relationship, new motherhood, Themes of childhood, Van Morrison, widowhood
“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
15 Father’s Days. Too few.
Much missed, he has missed so many milestones, the stuff of Hallmark greeting cards and scrapbooks and social media updates. He missed 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 we had hoped for her when she was an infant. He missed meeting her boyfriend – with hair as long as his used to be and a student of archeology – the thing he said 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 the first Christmas Day without him, that my daughter took me for a drive. My father, far from his home in rural Northern Ireland, had been teaching her to drive on what he still considers the wrong side of the road. He spent every afternoon in the passenger seat as his only granddaughter drove her dad’s car around the quiet streets of our Phoenix neighborhood, her elegant hands at ten-to-two on the steering wheel, encouraging 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. I watched from our door as she proceeded west on Montebello Avenue, maintaining a slow and steady 25 mph, taking me from adolescence remembered into motherhood and widowhood. Unaware and seemingly unafraid behind the wheel, my girl was stoic, the whole scene reminding me then and still 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.
During a visit to Phoenix this past winter, she drove me to the drugstore. Watching 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 her father removed the training wheels from the pink bicycle she got for Christmas – 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 letter to him. For good measure, he even added sparkling streamers. Before I am 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 – the color was irrelevant.
The pink bike had training wheels – “stabilizers” as we called them when I was a child 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. 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 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 one that was – in our family’s story – 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 gone out of his way to give me 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. We knew better and therefore had brought band-aids along with a video camera to record the moment. You know the one. Her daddy 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. Still, our darling girl kept both nerve and balance when she climbed on again. And then she was 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 she, 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.
