Confessions: Bike riding

(This is Confessions, where I tell you something weird and completely pointless about me.)

I’m not someone who really does “embarrassed.” I watched Glee. I watch Grey’s Anatomy. I don’t believe in guilty pleasures and have always been very open about my flaws and foibles, and whatever, you can take from it what you wish.

There has historically been one exception to that. It’s a flaw I have — one of many, to be totally clear, but the one I try the hardest to hide. I got masterful at changing the subject or whatever, and other than my family members and one friend, nobody knows this thing about me who I didn’t want to know it. Until now.

I can’t ride a bike.

Growing up on a farm, I remember learning to ride a bike, and I got to where I almost could do it, and then one day I was flying down our gravel driveway, and I crashed, and I flew over the handlebars, and ouch.

And then that was a wrap. It wasn’t that I was scared of riding a bike, at least as far as I remember. I just didn’t do it. We lived on a little country road, so going to see friends, it was easier to walk through fields or along the trees on the side of the road then ride a bike on a one-lane deathtrap. So I didn’t need a bike to go see friends, and without that, there was just never a point. Eventually, it got to the point where it was a little weird that I didn’t know how, but I played sports year-round, so bike-riding time was taken up with baseball practice, or soccer practice, or basketball practice. And then it got a lot weird, but when something’s a lot weird you just ignore it and hope it goes away.

Eventually, I was 15 and couldn’t ride a bike, and unless you’re Phoebe in Friends, that’s the point where you just close the door on bikes and hope it never comes up.

For the last 20 years, that’s been fine. Really, unless you’re on an island getaway and someone wants to do a bike tour, how often does “let’s ride a bike” come up in the average life? Not much. And on a vacation, it’s real easy to just say “Nah, I don’t feel like it right now,” and then change the subject.

But now I have kids. Our daughter, Abigale, knows how to ride a bike already. The benefits of co-parenting (and also not becoming her dad until she was almost 6) mean that I escaped that task altogether.

The boys, though? They’re 30 months old. (Kidding, I don’t still use that age construct, they’re 2 and a half.) Maybe I can get Abigale or their mom or their uncles or something to do the teaching, but I find it hard to believe I can just duck bike-riding forever; even if they learn from someone else, surely I’ll need to ride with them?

So one of these days, I’m gonna have to just suck it up and learn to ride a bike. If you’re lucky and you time it just right, you’ll probably have the chance to see an overweight guy in his late-30s balancing on top of some bicycle and trying (and probably failing) not to fall. If you do, feel free to laugh at me. I’ve earned it. And like I said, I don’t really embarrass.