I will never forget the day Phil taught me to ride a bike. It was at the Bow Lake house. I was in third grade, so he was in fourth. I recently found a note he had jotted down during his college days in Bellingham: teaching Claudia to ride a bike, along with some other subjects he wanted to write about, and it prodded me to write something down. But then I found the story he had written so many years ago...
Teaching Claudia to Ride a Bike
by Phil Kendall
I used to ride my bike in the front yard, zigzagging around the clumps of weeds that distinguished our lawn from the neighbor's. It was an old bike. I got it from a guy who had taken pretty good care of it, though, and it only cost twenty dollars.
I remember one day in summer when my sister Claudia was watching me from the front porch. She was sitting with her chin resting in her hands and her elbows poking into her dimpled knees and I was getting pretty bored myself 'cause by then I could easily ride the course without my tires rubbing any of the clumps. I asked her if she wanted to learn how to ride a bike and she didn't say a thing, but she jumped right up and ran over to me, grabbing one of the handle bars. "Okay, Claudia, let me get off first. I'll just walk alongside you until I think you've got control."
Her legs were not long enough to reach both pedals at the same time so it looked, when she started, like she was always just getting on. The bike wobbled down the sidewalk, then straightened out in a slow, steady roll. I took my hand off the rear fender and watched her with confidence as the bike headed for the soft grass.
Just as she was about to reach the grass, the front tire jolted a small rock and swung sharply to the left. "Put on the brakes," I yelled. I had forgotten to show her how to use the brakes. She was about twenty yards from me now and I ran after her, but the gap between her and the rockery was closing too fast. The runaway bike hit the rocks just before I got there, then toppled over the edge.
The drop-off was about four feet to the driveway. When I went to school the next day, my teacher asked me what happened to my chin. I very softly said: I fell down the driveway.
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Copyright © Philip A Kendall, All Rights Reserved.
