Daddy won it from an auction one Sunday televised on our big console television while Mama, my brothers, and Uncle Wayne sat around the living room cracking jokes about Jerry Lewis’s hairstyle. I remember my first bicycle like it was yesterday.
While Daddy sipped his coffee, he and I strategized our bids made over the telephone and how the money would surely help people suffering with muscular dystrophy. You probably remember those great old telethons as well as I do. I kept one eye on the tablet Daddy was figuring on and the other eye on that shiny bicycle.
“Daddy, can I refill your coffee cup?”
“Daddy, I love that bicycle so much!”
I was not proud of myself for the obvious manipulation of his softer side, but I was just plain tired of walking. That bike had my name on it, so every half hour I would pull the phone from the kitchen wall, stretching the cord as far as it would stretch to dial the numbers for him to place a higher bid until victory was ours.
It was thrilling for a young boy to ride around the neighborhood on a famous bike. Well, it was on television, and my brother Richard and I had driven Daddy’s truck all the way over to the local television station to collect it. Surely that made it more substantial than the ones in the windows of the local Western Auto store sharing the spotlight with lowly shovels, lawn mowers and toolboxes, I thought.
The bike was glorious. The color was Tuscan Sun, even though Mama referred to it as Big Bird yellow. It didn’t bother me because she was clearly jealous that her legs were too long to ride my new bicycle. The few times she tried were disastrous, with Daddy running behind her before she crashed into the fig tree. I reminded her of this often.
The seat was shaped like a banana, the handle bars were regal, and as I rode my televised bicycle up and down the hills on Dykes Chapel Road, I felt my position in the neighborhood elevated to a higher status than the other kids. After all, most of their bikes were old and rusty, usually hand-me-downs, and the dullest of colors — dark green, blue, or gray. I felt a moment of sadness for them as I pedaled by on my famous bicycle, and, I confess, an air of superiority.
After every ride I opened up the sliding glass doors, slid my foot down on the kickstand, and parked it on the shiny linoleum in Mama’s kitchen. It was not a bike to be left outside. That was a summer I will never forget, and when I close my eyes today at 45, I travel back to when I stretched my arms out wide, the wind in my face, coasting down the hills of my childhood.
Email reaches former Columbus resident David Creel at [email protected].
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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