Saw a little kid pushing a bicycle up College Street in Lewiston the other day and he was smiling like the shark after it ate Quint.

And why shouldn’t he? Even from a distance you could tell that bike was spanking new. It gleamed so bright that every inch of paint and chrome threw arrows of sunlight at my eyes. The tires had all their tread and you just knew there wouldn’t be a single pebble lodged between them. Not yet. Because the beaming kid was still pushing it instead of riding, no doubt because his joy was so great, he didn’t trust himself to ride a straight line.

Ah, the heady joy of a new bicycle. The handle grips still have all their nubs. The spokes still shine and those little reflectors on the pedals are pristine, unsullied by dust and road grime.

There’s a picture of me floating around somewhere and in it, my bearded father is presenting me with my very first bicycle. A Schwinn, I think, painted the color of a new penny and sporting a banana seat. I’m smiling so broadly, you wonder if it didn’t cause permanent nerve damage. And looking back, I kind of wonder if I’ve since smiled as brightly and sincerely as I did when I first clapped eyes on that sparkling ride.

When you’re a kid, new bikes are heaven. When we grow up, we babble about our new cars, new computers, new hand-held gadgets, but that glee just isn’t the same. I’d go so far as to suggest that all the things we seek and accumulate as adults — the Jet Skis, the lovers, the acre of land up near Dover Foxcroft — are symbolic relics we gobble up in vain attempts to rekindle that feeling we got at the sight of our very first bicycle.

The home shopping people know it for sure. They understand how you miss that childhood Huffy, and they will try to entice you with Ginsu knives, gleaming jewels, electronics — any number of things that sparkle and set you to thinking that you need something new to put a spit shine on your doldrums.

But it never comes back, and so driving up College Street, I found myself envying the boy with the toothsome smile and the bike he was probably going to name after the prettiest girl in school. By now, he has probably figured out that his baseball glove will hang snug and secure from the handlebar. He has probably come to learn that putting a horn, bell or streamer on his ride is a horrible idea that will cause him to lose 10 cool points in one stroke.

I’ll bet by the end of the week, he will have discovered that popping a wheelie isn’t really that hard at all. It’s just a matter of timing, more than anything else, and once he gets it down, you’ll almost never seen the lad on two wheels again.

I’ll bet he’s figured out all the bike friendly shortcuts and now gets everywhere he’s going in record time.

I’ll bet he polishes his reflectors every night before bed and then dreams about where he’ll ride in the morning.

I’ll bet he named it Betsy Sue.

Ah, the relationship between boy and bike. It’s much easier and far less delicate than friendships with other boys. It’s more reliable and much less confusing than the relationships he will develop, over time, with pretty-smelling girls.

But alas, while the bliss of new bike ownership is transcendent for a boy, it is also fleeting. If not by the end of this summer, then by the middle of next, the glory of it will start to fade. Tire treads will wear away, reflectors will become grease-smeared, paint will chip and refuse to shine.

The lad will begin to forget his bike — in a friend’s backyard or on a narrow path out in the woods. If it doesn’t disappear, he will retrieve it, but then drop it in the driveway as he rushes inside to catch his favorite cartoon. If it doesn’t get run over, the bike will survive another day, but then it will be left out in the rain, loaned out to dolts, crashed into garbage cans and generally misused.

The chain will become dry and forever thirsting for grease. The tires will go bald, the spokes will get bent, the sprockets will become flaked with rust. What had been so loved just a summer ago will be reduced to a hunk of metal taking up space in the garage. Like poor Puff abandoned on Honah Lee, bicycles cannot survive the fickleness of youth. “Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys.”

Boy, ain’t it the truth. The beaming little boy on College Street was something to see, all right, but give it a year or two. Little boys who beam over bikes become sullen brats who will throw tantrums if they have to play the same video game more than twice. Bicycles they once rode so proudly don’t seem so special after the kid next door has something bigger and faster.

And so Betsy Sue, a two-wheeled gem that was once everything to a boy, will end up rusting down to nothing out in a field or it will get rolled into the canal for one 10-second rush of excitement. Perhaps, in its final seconds as a functional bike, it will wonder what it did to deserve such mistreatment at the hands of the boy it had served so faithfully. And then it will be gone. Another magical piece of boyhood flicked away without a care.

My own bike, the Schwinn, got left out in the woods while I was chasing bees, or possibly girls. By then it was rusting and squeaking and the chain kept falling off because I couldn’t be bothered to squirt a few drops of grease on it and maybe pull back the tire a little. I forgot about it the whole night and when I went back in the morning, it was gone. Serves me right, really. Bicycles deserve better.

And frankly, so do magic dragons.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. You can write to him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com, but shh, he still believes in magic dragons.

Copy the Story Link