A Fish without a Bicycle

If kids are doing wheelies, why can't a healthy grownup pedal down the block?

Off I clatter on the bike known as Blue Jewel.

We’d no sooner chosen my shiny blue bike than the salesman proposed training wheels. My father looked dismayed; my mother bought the pitch. It wasn’t like her to spend extra money. She’d drive out of her way to save a few cents on canned tuna. But she couldn’t say no to training wheels. “Dear, you know how timid Rona is. They’ll build her confidence.”

My father rode a black bicycle to work at the English department. The most dignified cyclist in town, he had the bearing of marble Romans I’d seen at the museum in Boston. He shook his head at the training wheels, which looked about right for a teddy bear’s bike. Then he pulled a few more bills from his wallet. In the soft little sound he made, both a sigh and a clearing of the throat, I heard shame.

Other kids had two wheels. I’d be the only one with four.

On Faculty Road, kids named their bikes. Chris Winn flew up and down on Red Rocket, his sister Kathy in pursuit on Blue Beauty (the name I wanted, but she beat me to it). I posed for a photo on Blue Jewel, then clattered halfway down the block. I touched the pavement with my Buster-Browned foot while my mother waved from the doorway. The Winn kids, whizzing and whooping, didn’t laugh at me but most likely didn’t even notice me. I had just resumed pedaling when it happened—the stone in my path, the flutter of unease—and down I went, howling.

Someone told me salsa dancing is like riding a bicycle. Once you learn, you never forget. I’ve heard the same of driving a stick shift, among other skills I never acquired. I always smile and change the subject. It’s been about 30 years since I last drove a weathered Oldsmobile, right-turning all the way. Wheels and I have a complicated history dating back seven decades to Faculty Road. The skinned knee, my mother kissing it better. Blue Jewel abandoned in the garage till we moved and my mother sold it.

You don’t hear much about people like me. We’d rather not discuss our embarrassing difference from the average six-year-old and at least 90 percent of the adult population. We pass as competent grownups: I have raised a son, edited a magazine, given keynote speeches, published two books. I’ve found the courage to confront a racist bully and release a dog I still miss from the pain of terminal cancer. Yet bikes unleash my inner wimp. At the thought of staying upright on two wheels, I don’t feel the wind on my cheek. I feel the pavement cracking my bones.

If anyone could have got me cycling, it should have been the trainer with the Frisbee-size grin. She worked for Health Heaven, as I’ll call the mountain compound where anyone with the bucks can ascend to the clouds of wellness. How she glowed when I wobbled a couple of feet without her firm hand on my back. My husband said of this news, “She’s too soft on you. She ought to take you to the top of a hill and give you a push.”

Next morning I straddled the bike while mulling this project of mine. Balance, momentum, pedaling. Falling, most of all. I thought and thought while the stares of passing strangers in designer workout gear bored holes in the back of my head. To find me absurd, they had to notice me. Maybe, like the Winn kids, they didn’t. But I’d become absurd to myself. My problem was not that I couldn’t ride a bike, but that I was pretending to learn—at a Health Heaven price.

A wise woman said, back when Paul and I were still fighting over who did the dishes, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” Irina Dunn, an Australian activist and writer, coined the phrase that tells me who I am. I can’t imagine life without my husband of 55 years and counting. But a bicycle? That I don’t need.

Once on a drive through the hills of Tuscany, Paul and I looked out on a procession of cyclists pumping away. We’d seen the same group at a café or two, tucking into their pasta carbonara with the zest of the happily famished. Paul had two good knees then, and wistfulness came over him. “We could do that too if you’d learn to ride a bike,” he said. I thought of that hard little seat, the sweaty bike shorts. No, thanks.

We didn’t need bikes to go adventuring. Before arthritis dug in, we hiked the vineyards of Provence, the Gulf Islands of B.C., the winding trails of the Cotswolds. We tramped up a hill in the rain to O Cebreiro, on the home stretch of Spain’s pilgrim trail, to feast by a hearth on cabbage soup and the well-earned pride of the weary. Anywhere worth going, it seemed, we could go on foot.

As a fish among the wheeled, I sometimes find myself on the margins. Other people take ferries someplace fun and rent bikes on the other side. They can bike Amsterdam like a local. I wish them well. The margins are my lifelong home. From the edge of the schoolyard, where I dreamed up tales of magic and nick-of-time escapes, to the desk where I’m writing to you now, solitude has been my pathway to the wellspring of delight. If not for training wheels and a tumble on Faculty Road, I might have cycled there. What counts is this: I arrived.

When my son was young, loving his wheels and Dr. Who in equal measure, the bike he’d customized was his personal Tardis. Ben had the run of the city, as long as he came home in time for dinner (offhand parenting even for the early 80s). I refused to hover and protect like my mother. Where he roamed I never knew, only that he often stopped at Toronto’s only Krispy Kreme, way out among suburban strip malls and body shops. Ben didn’t much care for doughnuts, but my mother had mentioned her fondness for a cruller found only at Krispy Kreme. He always took the long way home so she could enjoy it fresh.

He never came to harm in the usual sense: a fall, an accident, a wrong turn at dusk on the far edge of nowhere. Then one summer afternoon, around the corner from his grandmother’s, he passed a pet shop and figured he’d check out the animals. Kittens, twirling and bouncing. A puppy to lick his finger. Ben locked his bike as we had taught him. Five minutes later, it was gone—the entire proceeds of his paper route, created piece by piece. A year must have passed since I saw him cry. That day he flung himself at my feet and wailed.

My head understood. My heart, not so much. I’d never known the feeling that drew Ben all over Toronto, the wind in his hair. (No helmet. Remember: early 80s.) My one regret about the bike I never rode is the joy I never shared with my child, who found his wellspring on a bike.

After my mother died, I cleaned out her freezer and found it bursting with crullers. She’d kept them for love of her grandson but had fallen out of love with the crullers and dreaded the calories. Krispy Kreme, to her, was a sweet idea, nothing more. Pretty much how I’ve felt about biking ever since I came home with Blue Jewel.

Strictly speaking, I could still learn to ride a bike. The best way to build confidence, I’ve read, involves coasting with the pedals removed (guess they’d never heard of this at Health Heaven). But why bother? Paul and I have entered our strolling years. I’m not sure if Ben still owns a bike (so much for that mother/son ride). And I’m not sure my doctor would approve. At my age, 76, a fall isn’t just a bugaboo.

I’ve still got time to learn something new. I’m thinking of it now, a goofy, tuneful skill you must have picked up a lifetime ago. It comes like breath while you’re puttering around. It brings the dog to your side. It won’t tone your muscles or test your grit, and I figure that’s the pleasure. As Lauren Bacall tells Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not, “You just put your lips together and blow.”

That never worked for me, but now I’ve got a YouTube tutorial. Any day I could be whistling a happy tune. Just don’t tell me it’s like riding a bike.

Is there a basic skill you finally learned years after the usual time? Maybe one you still haven’t tackled? Secrets welcome, no shame allowed.

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