A Kid Named Crash

My son fell off of his bike for the first time the other day, which is really great because now we’ve got that over with, know what I mean? We’ve got that first big spill out of the way and we can stop waiting for the other shoe to dr....what do you mean he needs new shoes? We just got him those! Didn’t we?

Sorry, got distracted.

The kid’s first bike wreck experience was enhanced by the fact that we were kind of far from our house at the time. He’d been biking, I’d been hoofing it along side of him, a feat that I’m guessing won’t be possible once the training wheels come off. Thus, I got to escort a wailing child and his bike a pretty good distance back to our house, which meant that some of my neighbors probably had the calm of their evenings shattered by the sound of a child crying out to the heavens. Most of my neighbors seem nice, the ones we’ve talked to anyway. I like to imagine them in their houses doing some mundane evening household task -- cooking dinner, watching television, writing strongly worded letters to the editor -- when suddenly, my son’s voice tapped their eardrums. They ran to their windows to see what all this shouting was about and saw a man (that would be me) pushing along a little bicycle with a sad little boy on it. “What’s that man done to that poor child?” they may have asked themselves.

“Oh yeah, sorry kid, I kinda forgot to mention...”

I think my favorite part of my kid’s first bike wreck is that for once, he was doing everything I had been telling him to do. Watching where he was going instead of turning back to look at me and almost smashing into a parked car. Staying near the curb instead of in the middle of the street. Looking both ways before crossing. He had even been using the momentum from downhills to make it up the next hill. All that gravity-induced speed had scared him so much that, for the longest time, he would only go down a hill if I was holding the back of his seat, a solution that’s about as sustainable as a rock-and-roll lifestyle with kids and a 9-5, especially in a city that’s as hilly as ours. That took some practice to work through, but we did it.

Oh! Oh! Now that I think about it, I have two favorite parts to this story, the thing I said in the last paragraph, and the fact that I had been watching him like, like, like a hawk! No no, like a very nosy hawk! Like a very nosy private investigator hawk! With a new pair of binoculars! I had been watching him very closely, turning my attention away for only seconds at a time to check for oncoming traffic. But then, on a flat patch of asphalt, when I noticed that the sun seemed to be speeding its descent, I reached into my pocket to grab my phone so I could check the time (A watch? What’s that?), and in that instant, BAM! Down he went.

There were no razor-toothed clowns involved in my kid’s spill, but there was a gutter. You see, in all my harping to stay out of the middle of the street and to stay close to the curb, I neglected to mention anything about the danger presented by gutters. So there on a flat patch of street, my eyes turned down towards my phone, my kid doing everything I had told him to do, he navigated his bike over a gutter, and the sideways incline was enough to tip over boy and bike, smashing them both into the cement.

So that’s done with, as is the getting-back-on-the-bike part. That, in fact, was a complete nonevent. The next day, it was as if no wreck had occurred. I’m thinking those training wheels won’t be along for the ride much longer.