The Gift of Bikes

Last week I mentioned my Welsh grandfather, the dairy farmer. He was a gardener in his later years. That was his real passion, rows of peas and beans, a bed of potatoes, some tomatoes in the green house. I never saw him ride a bike, and it would not surprise me if he never did.

My father was the first of eight children, a crew of farm workers really. He shared a room and bed with two or three of his brothers, and as the oldest, was afforded a small desk, in the closet, where he did his schoolwork. He is the only one who went on beyond the village school, to the grammar school in the nearby town, and then shockingly to the university, where he did a PhD in chemistry that launched him on the adventure that, eventually, included me.

My dad could ride a bike, but he didn’t do it much. Maybe in his university days he had an old three-speed to get around on. In the entirety of my childhood, he never owned his own bike, and I can only recall a handful of neighborhood rides with him, when I was still quite small. He was a workaholic, by birth or training, and that just got worse as he got older and I became more independent. Eventually, I think, the idea of riding bikes left him altogether.

Given that history, it’s some kind of miracle that I ended up a bike rider. The Christmas just before I turned nine, he and my mom went to the Schwinn bike shop on Olde Shell Road in Mobile, Alabama and asked for a BMX bike. They can’t have known what they were shopping for, except that I’d rattled on and on about wanting one.

I’d say it’s nice when someone gets you a gift they know all about, an expression of their hope to share that thing with you. It’s another thing entirely for them to invest what had to feel like a lot of money, in a toy. Even today, I count the morning I stumbled out to the living room and discovered that bright red BMX bike as one of the best of my life.

It was quite a gift. They couldn’t have known how it would shape my life.

As my dad was winding his way toward the exit, Parkinson’s Disease stealing his mobility and his spark, he would occasionally ask me about the bike business. He’d watched it take me all over the country and across the ocean. He couldn’t believe I made a living selling them. He couldn’t believe what people would pay for a really nice bicycle.

He never once connected the dots between the BMX under the tree and the customers in Japan, Korea, France, the UK, the West Coast, the East. He wondered how it all happened, and how I’d written some two million words about bikes and didn’t look like stopping. He frankly couldn’t imagine a person devoting their life to a toy, not that he was disappointed, just persistently confused.

Yesterday was Fathers’ Day here in the US. It’s a dumb holiday mostly I think, but a chance to appreciate my dad and his dad for working their asses off so I could grow up and make a living playing with and selling these toys, these dumb little contraptions that will take you anywhere you have the mind and legs to go. Some days I get down on the bike industry. Some days I feel exasperated by customers who just can’t see the privilege and joy in this thing. But I think back to the moment I walked into the living room, eight-years-old and saw that red BMX in front of the tree. What a gift. What a gift.