SAGE ADVICE: I’ve got a bike

My father brought my sister a bike home in the back seat of the tan Oldsmobile when I wasn’t quite 5 years old.
She was 9 and I think it might have been her first bike. It was a girls bike, with a banana seat and little iridescent streamers poking from the handlebars.
Both of us were as excited as if it were Christmas.
While I was admiring her new set of wheels, which up until two or three minutes later was the coolest, greatest, most awesome thing I’d ever seen, my father leaned down and asked what I thought.
I think I said something about it being the coolest, most greatest, awesomest thing mine eyes had ever beheld.
“Would you like one?” he asked.
I nodded or said one day or some other thing that makes me seem when the story gets retold that I wasn’t a greedy, selfish, pig of a kid and then he pulled a brand new, shiny red boys bike from the trunk of that tan Olds with the three on the tree and cloth bench seats throughout.
I don’t remember much about what happened next. I know I hopped on the bike and pedaled down the gravel driveway in a full-tilt boogie to the circle place outside my grandparents’ house.
The next day I pulled a Superman sticker from a box of Cheerios and wrapped it around the bar on the bike.
The day after, riding on the hill just above the strawberry patch, a bee landed on my thumb and left a welt the size of a quarter.
A year later I wore what I was sure were permanent scars on my knees from the times when I didn’t quite circle the circle place at my grandparents’ house.
Years later I discovered that a car could get me to the pool, friends houses and the little store near both a lot quicker than my old bike. I put away the two wheeled contraption that had been the coolest, most greatest, awesomest thing ever and forgot, I thought forever, the joys of pumping my legs with the wind, flying down gravel paths with no fears, no worries and no pressures. I put away those childish things and drove full speed into the world of manhood, of deadlines, of all things internal combustion.
Then it came back just like that as I ran screaming, “Pedal hard, pedal hard.”
My oldest was riding, pumping his legs with the wind, flying over a grassy area with no fears, no worries and no training wheels. He was chasing in a full-tilt boogie the blue-skied freedom of childhood and all that entails. And I was chasing him, screaming “pedal hard, pedal hard.”
As soon as I can, I’m going to find him a Superman sticker. I have a feeling he’ll know what to do with it.