The Pale Blue English Racer
I was the only kid in the sixth grade with a fat-tire Schwinn. No one had those anymore. All my friends were riding English racers with hand brakes and gears. I asked for a new bike, but my father said they were too expensive.
Then one Christmas morning, I woke up to find a skinny-tire, three-speed bike with hand brakes next to the aluminum tree that Mom insisted on because it didn’t shed and could be used every year. The tree embarrassed my sister and me, but when I saw the bike, nothing else about Christmas mattered.
“It’s beautiful,” I cried. It wasn’t new, but my dad had painted it baby blue, and it was perfect, even with its remaining bruises, the ones Daddy couldn’t quite erase. These imperfections made me love it even more. It was as though we, the bike and I, instantly had a history, that each scrape or dent signaled a trial we had endured together.
“It’s all yours, so take good care of it, and be careful. Let’s go outside. I want to show you how it works.”
I followed my father outside into the Florida sunshine and pretended to be listening attentively as he explained something about how the brakes worked and how to use the gears, but as I watched him, so intent on teaching, I couldn’t help but think about all the wonderful places I would go.
“And don’t push the pedals backwards,” he said. “You want to be very careful, so the chain won’t come off.”
I nodded obediently. No going backward. Or going back now. With my new, used English racer, I achieved a level of freedom unknown to me, able to go farther, faster than ever before. I rode that bike to school every day, no matter what the weather. Thunderstorms were particularly exciting.
Mom, who had never learned to drive, tried to keep me home on those days, but I pleaded until she had no choice but to let me forge on.
On one particularly stormy morning, I saw my friend from next door, Judith, and some carpool kids on their way to school. Judith’s mother gripped the wheel as they passed, leaving a wake I negotiated with some unsteadiness. Judith smiled as she rubbed a circle on the back window of their old Packard, the better to see me swerving and pedaling against the wind in the driving rain.
Judith, the smartest girl in our class, told me her mother had said it was a shame how I ran wild and that my mother should have more control over her daughter.
What they didn’t know was that each roll of thunder announcing another bolt of lightning thrilled me. At school, the other bikers and I put our yellow slickers and hats near the window to dry.
“Take off your shoes and socks, too,” Mr. Schreiber said.
As we walked barefoot to our seats, the others looked on enviously. At our desks, we wiggled our naked toes, allowed to break all the rules just because our parents wouldn’t or couldn’t drive us. Carpoolers, what do they know? I thought as I smiled at Jimmy, the cutest boy in our class, who smiled back.
Now I could ride everywhere after school with Jimmy and his friend, Billy. One day we put our books on the backs of our bikes and took off for the rock pit where we climbed the gravel mountain to look out over the soupy green water below. “Last year a kid from Norland drowned in the middle,” Jimmy told us. “They say it’s bottomless.” We rode on without testing the theory of its depths.
There were more places to explore. Next we rode all the way to Greynolds Park where Jimmy and I left our bikes and took a path into the trees. We found a quiet spot and kissed—my first kiss. “It’s getting late,” I said, wanting to stay but needing to go. “I know,” said Jimmy. “And Billy’s out there standing guard.” We both laughed and as we started on the path back to our bikes and to Billy, Jimmy took my hand and folded his ring into it. “Would you?” he whispered. “Yes,” I said, looking at a little silver band I had never seem him wear before. Did he buy it just for me, for this moment?
“Here, help me.” I lifted my hair. He unclasped my necklace and slid his ring onto the chain alongside my birthstone. Once it was in place, I pulled the ring to the center of the chain and held it there, making it real.
“Now we’re going steady,” he said.
“We are,” I replied, and we continued on our way.
My first grownup bike, my first boyfriend, and my first kiss.
I knew from the start that the pale blue English racer from my father was a gift of love, like a box of shiny gems: one of freedom, another of adventure, one of danger, and another of responsibility. I would grow to cherish them all.
—
Jean P. Moore was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Miami, Florida. She received her PhD in English and began her professional career teaching American literature and writing. She later worked in telecommunications as an executive director of workforce development, a position she held for a number of years. Jean has since returned to her first loves: the study of literature and writing.
Her work has appeared in newspapers, magazines, and literary journals such as upstreet, SN Review, The Timberline Review, Angels Flight Literary West, Fiction Southeast, the Hartford Courant, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her novel Water on the Moon, published in June 2014, won the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Award for contemporary fiction. Her poetry chapbook, Time’s Tyranny, was published in the fall of 2017 by Finishing Line Press and was nominated for The Massachusetts Book Award, 2018. Tilda’s Promise, a novel, was published in September 2018. Jean and her husband divide their time between Greenwich, Connecticut and the Berkshires in Massachusetts.
Follow Jean on Twitter https://twitter.com/jean_pmoore
Find out more about her on her website http://www.jeanpmoore.com/
Amidst all the characters in this moving novel of loss, love, and renewal, the two who grieve hardest have the most to discover. Tilda Carr has lost the love of her life―her husband, Harold―after forty years of marriage, while her granddaughter and namesake, Tilly, has lost her grandfather and best friend. Together they will embark on a journey of discovery in this intergenerational story of friends, family, and lovers―and learn that there is always hope for new beginnings.
Category: On Writing
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Jean, I loved this story. It brought me back to my own very different experiences around that age.