THE CHRISTMAS BICYCLE*

That same year we got our first bicycle

for Christmas, we got a record player too. The winter had not yet been tough. A memory of the sun was still in my eyes as I stepped into the dimness of the house. "Well?" someone said. Well what? It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, then I saw the record player in its big blond cabinet. There was only one record with it, Hank Williams' hit songs. "Good-bye, Joe, we gotta go," he sang. Over and over. And there, near the record player, stood a bicycle.

We learned to ride bicycle that Christmas Day. We bundled ourselves lightly, those with legs long enough to reach the ground, and we took the new bike outside. There was snow on the ground around the house but when you've got a new bike and you're a farm kid who has never seen anything quite so shiny, who has never had anything so red and bright and wonderful, you don't care if it's winter, you don't care if you turn blue riding and riding until you've learned to stop the wobbling. We tramped out a track in the snow around the house. We weaved and wobbled our way, each of us, learning to ride.

I am the oldest, so I go first. That's just how it is, a family of nine kids, someone has to go first, it might as well be me. I climb on the bicycle and wheel away and I don't even make it to the corner of the house before I have snow up my nose. I pick myself up and pick up the bike and I climb back on. You ride the horse that threw you. The two oldest girls, Kack and Nancy, and my next brother, Flip, all wait their turns. "Hurry up, Tom!" they say impatiently.

There were rules; they were never spoken but they were very clear: you got to circle the house once on the track we had tramped out, then it was the next person's turn, in order of age. You stayed on the track around the house and didn't go free-lancing cross country. You didn't whine or cry out when you fell. And you didn't dally-oof around picking yourself up, there were others waiting.

The oldest four of Bill and Oma Montag's kids learned to ride bike in the snow that Christmas day in the 1950s. Inside, Hank Williams was singing away - "Good bye, Joe," again and again. We would work the grooves almost all the way through that thick, black piece of vinyl, playing it over and over. Hank Williams might have been dead already, I don't know, I haven't done the math.

Done with riding bike, we might have come back into the house, the two oldest boys, the two oldest girls, smug and swaggering and shining because we had a bicycle and we could ride it. No one could take what we knew from us. We didn't have a lot of money that Christmas, but it sure seemed like we had everything we'd ever need.

Our mother might have made hot chocolate for us when we came back into the house blue and cold and laughing. Maybe we sat at the table at the end of the long kitchen, sat there back under the stairs, beyond the wood stove. We might have had our hot chocolate and laughed some more and congratulated ourselves on how fortunate we were - a new bike, learning to ride, a record player, and Hank Williams yodeling his way into the rest of our lives.

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* from Curlew: Home - Essays & a Journey Back. Available from Tom Montag, PO Box 8, Fairwater, WI 53931. $12.50 plus $2 shipping & handling.

Comments

[suzanne]

O, Tom yes I can see it all!
shades of my elder son's first bike ridings
atop our hill in the Driftless Zone
the drive was yellow gravel
as was Lynch Hollow road
.7 of a mile down the hill
so he only had hilly grass and gravel
to learn on

with many a fall before
success;
and great frustration
but never giving up

not much different,
though his learning was in '75
and not in the snow

[Dave]

Very nice essay. As usual, you ace the ending!

[maria]

So evocative – I could feel the nip in the air as I watched the kids take turn on the bike. I heard their voices and, in the background, the song, a little tinny from the speaker. All the kids, riding in circles, feeling free and boundless – and yet so close to home.

[Tom Montag]

Suzanne, Dave, Maria--Thanks, all of you. I'm glad my memory of the Christmas bicycle resonates for you. Seems like we are given these moments and then can never get them back unless we chose to share them.