Angela Patten

When I was a child growing up in Dublin, bicycles were everywhere. No one we knew owned a telephone, a refrigerator, or a car. My father rode his heavy black bicycle to and from work and my mother carried the shopping home in a basket on the front of her slightly smaller bike. She often had one of us children riding behind her on the back carrier as well.

One evening I was doing just that when my foot got stuck in the back wheel. The spoke bit into my ankle,

but my screams were drowned out by the noise of a double-decker bus that was passing by. The bike pitched over, fortunately not in the direction of the bus, and Mother and I and the shopping went flying.

A neighborhood child saw the accident and obligingly ran home to tell my father that I was dead. There was a big fuss made over me and I was taken to the local hospital to have my wounded ankle treated. I am sure I reveled in all the attention. Because she was not actually bleeding, no one gave my poor mother any attention at all. Her bike, the household’s trusty carthorse, was fixed up and put back into service again.

Although it was much too big for me, I learned to ride on that same bicycle by falling off and getting back on countless times. I finally got my own red Raleigh bike when I was ten. I loved that bike and I pretended it was the horse I had always wanted by tying it up to the railings and talking to it at the end of a ride.

The bike I have now looks a lot like that early one and I am tempted to talk to it whenever I take it out of its stall, mount up and head for the hills.