I’ve spent the last four hours online, researching trail-a-bike/stroller hybrids for my firstborn-to-be. Finally gave it up (for tonight)to look at some more stimulating words.

I might be jumping the gun here,as I have eight weeks before the little one even makes an appearance, but I am a diehard biker. Also a little bit concerned about post partum depression, so looking to get back into the swing of things asap.

Anyway, during the course of my internet travels through ad after mind numbing ad, I kind of started to realize what it is that I’m doing. I’m closing the gap on a lifetime of cycling. I’m introducing my little one to a lifestyle (again, jumping the gun) that is so ingrained that i didn’t even think twice about it. A bike trailer/stroller thingy isn’t even an option for me. It’s a neccessity.

I don’t remember the name of my first bike. I know it was blue and sparkly, kind of a lowrider deal. It had streamers coming from the handlebars. Very cute. I have a vivid memory of riding it down a prairie grass covered hill in front of my grandparent’s house along with my brother and cousins, who had bmx type bikes. I wrecked mine. I vaguely remember blood, but there was so much of that when I was a kid, it hardly matters. It happens when you try to keep up with three boys.

My next bike was a bmx. More suited to the masculine, one-up environment I grew up in. It lasted till I outgrew it.

Since then, I have had an incredible array of scrapes, crashes, and near misses on a number of different cycles. I’ve been hit by three cars – all while I was a bike courier.

I’ve damaged my shoulders, my knees, my shins, my feet, and my wrists in various accidents. In my misspent twenties, I’ve woken up on more than one occasion, bedsheets stuck to my body with my own blood, after another disastrous trip home from the bar.

I’ve also toured the Gulf Islands, much of the Rockies,and a large part of Switzerland,on a bike. I’ve spent more time enjoying my daily commutes than the average person. I’m in great shape, if I do say so myself. And, having never owned a car, I’d like to think I’ve left a smaller footprint in our delicate world than most.

I hope my child will get as much out of biking as I have. I’m already terrified for him/her,on a bike in the mean streets (or trails!). I know firsthand what can happen, through one’s own carelessness as well as through others’. But, like most things in life that are worth anything, you gotta take that risk.

Stunning imagery. Stunning. (And I am sorry I am so late to it. But so glad I didn’t miss it.)

My bike was pink. Pink pleather seat, as wide as a Cadillac. She had her name, “Dusty Rose” emblazoned across the the bar beneath the silver, beribboned handlebars. Her tires were nobby and thick and devoured gravel and sand and any other malicious thing in the street that tried to dethrone me.

She was beautiful.

And we traveled the neighborhood together. Dawn to dusk. Great swaths of pavement beneath the pedals…I would never NEVER let my girls disappear like I did on my Dusty Rose day after hot, humid day.

I ran her into a concrete wall one day. But that is our only horror story. And we both recovered from that fairly quickly. She was the definition of freedom.

A few years ago, I started doing triathlons. It was the first time I had been on a bike since Dusty Rose. This bike was blue. It had thin, spindly tires that broke out in a rash if the asphalt was too bumpy. The seat was made from a thin sheet of wrought iron barely the width of my pinky finger. All that was missing was a pair of coke bottle glasses taped over the reflector in the front.

That bike spat me out into a busy intersection the day before my triathlon. The pavement chewed up my knee and left shin and the impact bruised my hip, though not as severely as it bruised my ego. We did our race the next day. I had mild panic attacks throughout the bike portion. And then I never rode it again.

my twentieth high school reunion is this summer. seems impossible, yes?

When I graduated from high school 20 years ago (okay, I’m seriously old) I blew almost a thousand dollars of the 10k+ I’d saved for my university education on a mighty fine bike that was meant to get me all around the city I was moving to for study. But I didn’t take it with me. That summer I had two too-close calls between me, my bike, the pavement and cars. I lost my nerve to bike in traffic.

So, I, too, will override my fears to get my kids on bikes. Because childhood biking was fun, fearless and fabulous. If only it stayed that way.

My first bike was new, yellow and black, and I must have ridden it, but I remember me more on a bigger bike, blue, that we bought for $7 at a church yard sale, and its successor, also blue, which we also got at a church yard sale. I lived on a busy street that I was not allowed to ride on, but rode between neighbor’s yards, over grass. In the summers, I was allowed to ride on the roads around my grandparents’ house, and a good thing, too, because there were no close kid neighbors.

I learned to ride a bike in a church parking lot, and learned to drive a car in a different one.

A few years ago, I went to see the Ellen Degeneres Show. The whole audience won new bikes (and some other fabulous prizes). It is the only new bike I have owned since the yellow and black one. Many people have borrowed and ridden it, but I find that I am generally too scared to ride on the road (or too lazy, because I live on a hill, or both).

Incredible story, Bonnie.