The Mountain Bike

I finally dug my mountain bike out of the basement and set to work fixing it. It had been down there for the last two years so I had a little work to do on it. It had been brand new two years ago, I think I got to ride it once, but then the divorce came, and I moved around to a couple of different apartments, and since it wasn't working anyways I just left it there. I was "given" the house back last fall (with said bike still there), and since the weather has turned, felt I should get it out and fix it up.

The main reason I had been able to only ride it once was my teenage stepson. He had a real knack for breaking things, hence the flat tire and the slightly bent back rim. It always seemed that whatever that young man touched, broke. There are still a lot of repairs I have to do around this house that he was "responsible" for.

I started thinking about when I was a young lad, and the destruction and mayhem my brothers and I used to deal out. My mother worked very hard to put a roof over our heads and we were not always very respectful of "that roof" or anything under it. I remember the time my brother rode a motorcycle into the house and he didn't use the doorway. A friend's small dirt bike was sitting in the front yard about ten feet from the house; my brother jumped on it and fired it up. What he didn't know was that it was "in gear" and he hadn't depressed the clutch. Well the bike immediately took off and he hit the front wall of the house with a mighty impact that left the front tire of the motorcycle protruding about 6 inches inside the inner wall of our living room. To say our mother was "none too pleased" with this would be a slight understatement. We were able to remove the bike without causing too much more damage, but the siding still had to be repaired. Several weeks later she had the siding replaced, but the siding that they put on was an entirely different color than what had been there, and she never had it painted over. I think she left it that way as a reminder to us of the damage we had caused.

There are a lot of reminders still left around here from my stepson and they are not all bad. I believe he seriously tried to be a good son, things just didn't always work out for him the way he intended. He and I had more than one dispute while he was here and some of them got rather uncivil. But I do have to say that most of the time we got along fairly well. Like the time he and his friend attacked me with squirt pistols and the next day when I came home with a giant super soaker and paid them back (bet they didn't think parents could be so devious), or all the times sitting on the back porch talking about life, or even the time the tornados were around and we all had to hide away in the basement. I miss the young lad, I hear he's all grown up now, has a good job and is living in another state. I never got to tell him about the "parent's curse" that my mother told me, which goes something like "may you grow up and have children that act exactly the same way you do". I understand this saying better now and do wish this for him, so that he may come away with some warm, lasting memories to keep after his children have moved out.

As for the mountain bike it's all repaired now and makes a lovely decoration sitting in my kitchen. Who knows I may even take it out for a ride once or twice this year.