Lost Relics of Childhood - The Red Bike

There are certain treasures that a person accumulates in their lives.  Maybe they don't hold any monetary value, but they are important in a way that's hard to describe.  I think these things take on a mystical importance when they have disappeared.  They existed but now they are gone.  I've lost a few.  One was unusual, however, it was a treasure shared by our entire neighborhood - a little red bike.

Every kid on our street learned to ride on this specific bike.  I don't know if it was passed from parent to parent or if it was stored in someone's shed.  I don't want to know the specifics.  All I do know, is that when you were approaching this rite of passage, it just appeared.

My parents took me out to the street for my first lesson.  I must first take a moment to describe our particular street.  We lived in an unincorporated part of town, meaning that all the city-proper could muster for our neighborhood was a road consisting of a bed of gravel, fortified with a black layer of tar.  No curbs.  No sidewalks.  On hot days the tar would get sticky and the cars would kick up rocks, which would make a very familiar cracking and pinging noise.  It was common for the tar to get hot enough to bubble.  We would love to pop these bubbles with our feet.  Now I was going to attempt to ride a tiny bike through this shit.  Falling into boiling hot tar sounds like something that might happen to a triceratops, not a little suburban kid living in the twentieth century.

Why did I learn to ride on this treacherous road, when I was sure to fall at least a few times?  Because that's the way it was done.  This was from a time when you taught a kid to tread water by throwing him into the deep end and letting him figure it out.  I also learned to walk, not on a soft carpet, but on our gravel driveway.  And although I can't remember it, I can only assume that I was taught to crawl on a bed of hot coals.  Toughening kids up was always the overriding idea when teaching life-skills, especially for boys.  Well, the joke's on them because I turned out to be a big sissy anyway.  Albeit, one who could properly ride a bike, fix that bike, swim, climb a tree, throw a baseball, kick a football, take a brutal tackle, change a tire, and a million other things that I'm thankful they taught me.  

So, back to the lesson.  I can only actually remember one part of it - riding for a short time, going off the "road", and falling over into the ditch.  Luckily it wasn't on the street, I have done that many times since and it makes your knees a mess of blood, gravel, and skin.  There must have been a lot of injuries of this stretch of road over the years as we all learned to ride.  Actually, I'm convinced that the bike didn't start off as red, but was slowly covered with the blood of neighborhood children.  I'll never know.  The bike is now missing.  It carried us through a few special, painful years and now it is just...gone.