My brothers knew how to ride bicycles. The oldest brother took me for a ride one time on Ernie’s bicycle. I crawled up in the basket over the front tire and got off involuntarily when my brother rode through a ditch and dumped me out breaking my collar bone. My middle brother went for a ride one day and got dumped off by the railroad tracks all by himself and broke his collar bone. My youngest brother, still older than me, was the only one I remember having a bicycle all his own. He broke his arm once and when the doctor took of his cast for the last time it was stuffed full of pencils and other things he stuck in there to scratch his arm.
My sister and I had a bicycle without tires or a handlebar. It was one of those big spools that at one time had telephone line or cable wrapped around it. That spool was much bigger than us. We flipped it on its side and somehow managed to get on it and move our feet to make it roll up or down the driveway. It’s a wonder we didn’t fall and break something. I don’t know how we managed to keep our balance long enough to stay on the thing. It may not have moved very fast, but I seem to remember having to run on that rolling spindle just to stay on top.
I often went visiting with Daddy. There was a family in Dewey Rose who had a little girl about my age. She was rich! She had her very own new bicycle. I was envious. Whenever Daddy went to visit her family, I liked to go along. One day she asked if I’d like to ride her bicycle. Would I? You bet! That’s when I learned to ride. I was probably six or seven years old and thought I was grown because I could ride a bicycle.
The Duncan kids had bicycles. They even had extra bicycles. Sometimes they asked my sister and me to go bike riding with them on those back-country roads. They also had chicken houses. We’d go in the chicken houses, especially when they were full of little chicks. I was usually always barefooted. You know, it can be quite messy to go in a chicken house barefooted. That’s not something I’d recommend. It was hard to dodge those little squishy chicken bombs even though most of them were covered with wood shavings.
I never did get my own bicycle, but I was glad I had friends willing to share their riches. Sometimes the simplest of things others might take for granted bring the greatest joy to someone else.