i'm a wheel

when you live in the middle of nowhere, few things are more important than some---ANY---form of transportation.

i started out with a really old, repainted tricycle. it was one of the jumbo trikes, and a little too big at first. it was flat red, and the handle bars and wheels had been spray painted silver. it was a pretty cool trike, but lack of masking had produced a severe pseudo-chrome overspray on the black tire sidewalls. and, the plastic pedals were long gone, so all you had to work with were the metal stems protruding from the center of the giant front wheel. that wasn't bad, so long as you were wearing shoes. but it hurt like hell if you were barefoot! (and what country kid isn't, all summer long?)

what i REALLLLY wanted was a Green Machine. infinitely cooler than a big wheel. and the saturday morning cartoon commercials...WOW! hordes of kids (boys, mostly) all from the same cul-de-sac! vast concrete vistas, so smooth and perfect for riding fast, spinning out... ahh, what i wouldn't have given to be a part of that!

but outside my front door, things were a little different.

first, no cul-de-sac. we lived just outside the city limits, across the tracks, at the top of a hill, on a dirt road...couldn't be further from a cul-de-sac. my riding space was confined to a concrete sidewalk, running parallel to the house from the front porch steps to the carport---about 20' long and only slightly wider than the rear wheels of the trike. on one side, grass. on the other, a strip of decorative white rocks scattered between the sidewalk and the tin skirt of the trailer. and in the white rocks were evenly-distributed plastic bouquets of abnormally colorful (and later, just before they were replaced, tattered and sun-faded) flowers. if you ran off the sidewalk, which happened about every other trip up or down, you had to hope you landed in the grass. i rode up and down, up and down...but it didn't take long for that to get reallllly boooooring. the other option was to try to ride through the grass, or pedal through the gravel in the driveway---both nearly impossible, and too much work to be called fun. the best you could hope for is once in a very great while, you could talk (a.k.a. hound) grandma and grandpa into moving their cars out of the carport so you could ride on the big concrete slab. sometimes it worked! but usually gale (a.k.a. my father) was either napping, or just didn't want to move his car from behind grandpa's. so no dice.

the other thing was, no other kids. none. the closest one, a boy from my class named joe, lived at the bottom of the hill on the other side of state highway 43. and he didn't even have a trike. so if i did get lucky enough to ride in the carport, i rode in circles...alone and silent. wheeeee!

eventually, things sort of worked out. i never gave up hope that one Christmas morning i would wake up to find that glorious Green Machine under the tree. well, it almost happened. i got a generic big wheel. eh? the same size, the same colors, but no hand brake. and really, what good is it without the hand brake?!? (not that i had anywhere to spin out, but still!)

but had i known what was to follow, i would have never said one bad thing about that tricycle. or the big wheel wanna-be. no, had i known what christmas of 1980 would bring, i would have never said a word. if i'd had any clue that i would have found a powder blue girl's bike, complete with a flowered banana seat and a white plastic basket decorated with bright plastic daisies under the tree, i would not have come out of my room that christmas morning!

there was no way i could ride with joe, on his new, super-cool BMX bike (which quickly replaced my Green Machine fantasy), on something as ridiculous-looking as that damn prissy girl bike! he could jump off ramps and ride through mud---which we always had, living on a dirt road---but i could not. i could make it about 10' before the mud caked up under my chrome fenders and i had to limp the stupid thing home and hose it all out! but i couldn't possibly have a BMX bike! "no," my grandmother repeated, "those are for boys."

sigh.