A short excursion on a sunny afternoon

It’s always pleasing when the most unplanned excursions turn out to be so much fun. For all the time I spend scrutinizing the family calendar and reading up on regional cultural highlights, figuring out which weekend we might be able to visit this museum or that landmark only to see the plans nudged aside by bad weather, Tim’s baseball schedule, too much work for Rick, or the out-and-out preference all four of us often cannot resist to just stay home when the opportunity arises – as I call it, the ever-present fine balance between agoraphobia and cocooning -- sometimes something that required no planning, research or advance ticket sales at all just happens and we have a great time. Familial serendipity.

Yesterday afternoon was just such an experience, though it was almost too minor to even term an excursion. I received an email saying that a library book Tim was on the reserve list for was finally available, and Tim asked me if I’d pick it up for him. Holly climbed off the bus cheerful and dynamic, unlike the day before; she skipped down the driveway, making me think maybe she was good for more than an afternoon snack and some coloring, which is how she often opts to spend the hour or two before dinner. The weather was sunny and cool.

“Want to go to the library with me to pick up a book for Tim?” I asked Holly. “If you’ll walk or ride your bike, you can buy a snack at Ferns.” Ferns is our local country store and it’s across the street from the library; both are exactly a mile from our house. In my ongoing efforts to see Holly spend time outdoors, active and exercising, I often couple a small treat with a walk or bike ride. It’s less of an issue with Tim because he plays so much baseball at this time of year.

Holly said she’d go with me, which I didn’t expect, but even more surprising was that when I asked Tim if he wanted to come along just so as not to overlook him entirely, he said he would. That was unusual; he usually opts for homework, reading and computer games in the late afternoon hours. I’m not sure what enticed him yesterday, but I was happy as the three of us set out on our bikes at about 4:30. It felt like a fine way to take advantage of a sunny mild afternoon, one in which we still had hours of sunlight left in the day although at other times of year it would have been dark by then already.

And despite the lack of planning and anticipation, we had a great time. Not even a minor bike malfunction could mar the fun: outside the post office, Tim’s chain got stuck in a gear sprocket, and although I know how to fix a derailed chain, I couldn’t get this one unstuck. As we stood there attempting to fix it, the postmaster himself came out of the building and pried it back into place for us. I was impressed with his abilities and tremendously grateful for his willingness to leave the office to help us.

We continued on our way, picked up the book, and then sat on the farmer’s porch at Ferns, basking in the late-afternoon western exposure. The kids ate ice cream sandwiches; Holly left me a quarter of hers to finish, which was a bonus I never expect these days.

It was a small and simple excursion, but a reminder of how much fun it is when circumstances just fall into place like that. By bedtime, a bad cold was lodging its way into my head and chest, and biking was the last thing I felt like doing. But I was so glad we’d taken advantage of an open and sunny afternoon. Sometimes I’m disappointed when plans I’ve taken great pains to organize fail to execute, but then I remember spontaneous pleasures like yesterday and I’m reminded of how things tend to balance out, one way or another, as long as you don’t work too hard at it.

A compliment, a question, and a few minutes of worrying

My seven-year-old daughter and I were on the Minuteman Bikeway, a paved-over rail trail just four miles from our house. Named one of the country’s best rail trails, it attracts dozens of walkers, runners, bicyclists and in-line skaters on sunny weekend days like the one on which we were using it.

I’d wanted to fit in an afternoon run, and Holly wanted to go for a bike ride, so I suggested we try to do the two activities in tandem. Holly is still fairly new to a two-wheeler, so we hadn’t tried this combination before, but I’d seen other parents doing it lots of times, and it appeared to me that as long as the bicyclist has fairly short legs and a small bike and therefore couldn’t ride very fast, it could work out reasonably well.

We made our way two miles down the path, with Holly just a short distance ahead of me. I could see her the whole time, and at the few road crossings on that two-mile stretch, she stopped to wait for me so we could cross together.

After we reversed direction at the two-mile marker she must have accelerated, though, because I started finding it harder and harder to glimpse her in the distance. She was way ahead of me and quickly widening the gap.

“Nice job!” said a jogger who looked to be in his late fifties or early sixties as he ran toward me. He pointed back toward Holly. “Very good work!”

I’ll take a compliment wherever I can get one, but for the next ten minutes or so I puzzled over just what he meant. What were we doing that constituted a nice job and good work? Was it that I was out exercising with my child? When my son and I used to go running together regularly, strangers would often comment because it’s a little bit unusual to see a nine-year-old boy jogging, but Holly and I weren’t doing anything out of the ordinary. Lots of kids her age ride their bikes. Did he just mean that she was a good steady rider? Maybe. She is small for her age, so although most kids at seven and a half are competent riders, perhaps he was impressed with her skill, thinking she was younger.

Or, I thought, did he mean because I was letting her get so far ahead of me? As I’ve come to realize, there are a lot of adults from earlier generations who think parents my age hover too much. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility, on this trail where many parents were biking so close to their kids that their wheels almost touched or else pulling them in bike trailers, that he was complimenting me for letting her ride at her own pace.

But her own pace grew faster and faster, and after she disappeared into the distance, I grew anxious. Compared to most parents we know, I give my kids quite a lot of leeway when it comes to personal safety, but not being able to see her at all in this setting alarmed me.

Still, I needed to keep running. I had over a mile to go before I’d be back at the park where the trail begins. I dearly hoped I’d find her when I got there, but there was nothing I could do in the meantime but keep moving forward. Stopping or slowing down certainly wouldn’t help the situation any when all evidence pointed to the likelihood that she was well ahead of me.

I worried that she had fallen and was hurt. I worried that someone had jumped out of the thick woods bordering the trail and snatched her. I worried that she had reached the park but then wandered into traffic there. And, too, I worried about what other parents must be thinking now that there was a child riding along the path with no accompanying adult anywhere in sight. The man who complimented me earlier might have been impressed that I let her go at her own pace, but that was when she was still within eyeshot of me. I wasn’t sure anyone would compliment me on this bit of recklessness.

The two miles unspooled as I ran at my usual steady but slow pace. I told myself all I could do was continue on to the park. When I got there either Holly would be waiting for me and everything would be fine or she wouldn’t and I’d need to act quickly to get help. One or the other.

So I had nearly twenty long minutes to worry about Holly’s well-being. Then I arrived at the park and there she was, standing next to her bike and beaming. The relief was tremendous, but I didn’t let on that I’d been worried. Nor did I want to scold her for riding so far ahead of me. She’s still new at biking and still developing her skills; if anything, I was impressed at how well she’d done. Although she’d soared far ahead of me, I didn’t really feel she’d done anything wrong.

But had I done anything wrong? I wasn’t sure. I thought again about the jogger who said “Good job!” Good job teaching her to ride a bike? Good job getting out together for a workout? Maybe. Not so good letting her get so far away from me, though – and then worrying about it for the remainder of the run.

But it all worked out. So I’m not sure what I’ll do differently next time we head to the Bikeway together. But whatever it is, I hope someone lifts my spirits with a quick, if ambiguous, compliment along the way.

Playing hooky

Yesterday I played hooky. After an hour of desk work, I shut down my computer and went for a three-hour bike ride. What a treat.

The sense of novelty that came with being out enjoying the sunshine rather than sitting at my desk reminded me of a tradition from my childhood. Every year, I was allowed to miss one day of school to go into Boston with my mother on the train. We’d go shopping and eat lunch at a restaurant, and although we could have done the same thing on a weekend or a school vacation day, it wouldn’t have been the same. Feeling sneaky, feeling special, the whole sense of doing something exceptional, was what made it so much fun.

And yesterday I discovered that playing hooky still feels special, even though being self-employed means that I no longer have to ask anyone’s permission to spend a day outside instead of at my desk. My 12-year-old niece Phoebe is visiting this week from Pennsylvania, and because she’s such a good athlete, I knew this was my opportunity to do the kind of bike ride my kids are still too small to do. Given the beautiful weather, I grabbed that opportunity.

We set off on the Minuteman Bikeway at 11. We rode steadily for an hour until we reached the Alewife Station at the end of the Bikeway; then we threaded our way along the extension to Davis Square, where we rewarded ourselves with a fabulous lunch of burritos and guacamole at Anna’s Tacqueria in Davis Square. In both directions of the ride, covering 24 miles round-trip, there was so much to see. Flooded swamps and back yards in Bedford and Lexington. The shimmering expanse of Spy Pond in Arlington. Brooks running through the still leafless woods. Along the Bikeway, women pushing infants in strollers, a preschooler using a scooter, dog-walkers whose multiple charges contrasted amusingly in size and breed, a middle-aged father riding his bike with two small kids in a trailer, an elderly couple walking slowly and stiffly together. It wasn’t crowded the way a sunny Saturday on the Bikeway would be, but there were plenty of people out enjoying some exercise and recreation.

By coincidence, I returned to the same town where our bike ride began in the evening for a different reason: I was writing a feature story on a hobby group that meets at the veteran’s hospital in Bedford. I spent the evening talking to some of the men who live in the hospital: men in their seventies and eighties, many missing limbs, some semi-immobilized by strokes or muscular disease, most in wheelchairs. They seemed to be enjoying their club, which was a fly-tying group, but the volunteers who were helping them tie flies all told me the same thing: it’s not about the fishing, it’s about the companionship. The men are just happy to have company and have people taking an interest in them.

I thought about that a lot while I observed the fun they were having. Even the ones who could barely speak or respond were smiling. All of them were once soldiers, deemed fit and able enough to go to war. Now they sit in wheelchairs in an industrial cafeteria with Easter bunny cut-outs pasted to the windows, glad for volunteers who come to help them tie flies for fishing excursions that the men are not physically able to take.

So it was a day of contrasts: physical fitness under a bright sun after three days of rain, all of us out enjoying a beautifully designed recreational trail; and then the VA hospital, with the men so physically compromised but still happy to have company. Yet as different as they were, both experiences reminded me that sometimes there is no more blessed way to spend a sunny day than skipping work or school to bask in the fresh air.

A bike ride, a fall, and a lesson

It was a case of felicitous happenstance that the kids had no school – a professional day – on what turned out to be a beautiful early-spring day, one of the first of the year. The sun shone and temperatures reached nearly sixty degrees. Tim went over to play at a friend’s house; Holly and I headed out for her first solo biking excursion, retracing the mile-long route via gravel footpath to the town Center that she had done many times on the tagalong attached to my bike but never on her own two-wheeler.

I was apprehensive. Holly developed her biking abilities last fall. First we practiced on a paved track, then in a nearby neighborhood with wide, flat, interlacing streets. The footpaths in our town are, by design, rough and unpaved, but this makes them challenging for small riders. The terrain is uneven and the paths wind a lot, so attention to both positioning and steering is critical. I wasn’t at all sure Holly was up to the challenge, but she insisted she wanted to try.

As I pedaled along behind her, it occurred to me that there’s really no way for a beginner to learn to ride a bike without falling a fair amount. No matter how much I coached her along, it was bound to happen. Bicyclists fall; it’s that simple. In general she seemed fairly steady and quite confident, but I knew it was inevitable that she’d take a spill at some point. There’s just no other way to develop biking skills than by practicing and trying and occasionally wiping out.

She did well heading up to the Center. On the way back, she started going a little too fast down a slight slope, lost control, and flew into the gravel. She skinned her knee and the side of her palm. She cried a lot. A police officer who happened to be driving by pulled over, lights flashing, to check on her, which I thought was very kind of him if a bit of an overreaction. For a moment, being a typical twenty-first century parent, I wondered if it was possible he’d say I was doing something wrong. Had I overlooked some obvious safety measure or allowed her in an area where she shouldn’t be biking? But he merely echoed what I had been thinking: Kids learning to ride bikes fall. There’s no way around it.

Holly and I sat on a stone wall until she felt well enough to stand up. Then she said, “I don’t want to bike anymore!”

We were just under a mile from home. “We can walk our bikes if you’d rather,” I offered.

“I want to drive!” she wailed.

I thought about it. Fetching the car wasn’t out of the question. We happened to be across the street from the home of a close friend of ours; I could park Holly there while I biked home to get the car, or I could ask her for a ride. We were also close to the library, and even though I know it’s not ideal on principle to leave kids at the library, I also knew she could rest unnoticed for fifteen minutes while I hurried home for the car.

But I also know how quick Holly is to flare up when she’s upset and how equally quick she is to calm down. Which made me suspect that if I didn’t leap in to find an elaborate solution to the problem – one that involved leaving her and her bike while I hurried home for the car and came back again to pick her up – she would soon get past the feeling that she needed a ride.

I fought the temptation to come up with a complicated solution, something that would assure that Holly would stop crying. I made myself refrain from trying to fix everything instantly. “We can’t drive; we don’t have the car,” I said calmly. “If you don’t feel like biking, why don’t we just walk our bikes for a while?”

I gave her a drink of water and dabbed off the drops of blood with a Kleenex. We started walking. After less than two minutes, she said in a very tear-worn voice, “I want to ride now.”

So we rode the rest of the way home. No more accidents; no more tears. And I had the satisfaction of knowing I’d had a chance to practice overcoming one of my faults as a parent: being too quick to try to fix things when they go wrong. I’d held back, made myself be patient, waited out Holly’s need to go home in the car. I’d suppressed my natural tendency to start making arrangements and devising solutions and generally being as proactive as possible to ensure that everyone is happy and everything works out. “We don’t have the car; let’s just start walking,” I’d said instead. And walking had worked. Walking had calmed Holly down until she was ready to ride again.

It wasn’t merely the age-old lesson of getting back on the horse – or bike – when you’re thrown off, though there was that too: certainly Holly ended the day feeling like a successful bicyclist rather than one whose first excursion had been cut short with a bad fall. And that’s an important one. But for me as a parent, it’s even more valuable to remember not everything that happens to the kids is a problem waiting for me to step in and fix it. This time, fixing wasn’t necessary; only waiting was needed. And waiting was exactly what worked.

Holly learns to ride a bike!

As of today, Holly can ride a two-wheeler! After a few sessions earlier in the summer that yielded mixed results, we took her up to the paved track on Saturday, at which time she picked up the ability to stay balanced and ride in a straight line -- she just couldn't start or stop very well. Yesterday, she and I went back to the track along with Holly's friend Samantha, who is almost exactly her age and very similar to her in terms of developmental skills, and they both practiced until they were both riding nearly flawlessly.

It was such a pleasure to watch both Holly and Samantha develop these abilities literally before our eyes. On the one hand, Samantha's mom -- my friend Nancy (coincidentally, I have lots of friends named Nancy) -- and I were so proud of their intensity and their courage in persisting until they could do what they set out to do, and we're both excited at the thought of future bike rides sans the tagalong attachment we've both lugged along behind us for the past half-decade or more. But we also commented on the vicarious thrill of imagining what it must feel like to develop such a remarkable ability as riding a bike. So soon after acquiring the skill, we take it for granted. Even Tim has commented on the curious fact that he doesn't need to think about balancing on a bike; as soon as you learn, it just happens effortlessly. But remember that initial feeling, a combination of balancing and soaring? The sense of "I can't believe this is possible...and I can't believe I'm the one doing it?"

"It would be like if we suddenly developed the ability to fly," I commented to Nancy. "Doesn't it seem like it would be that same kind of thrill, that sense of liberation from the usual constraints of gravity?"

I'm so happy for Holly, but I also learned something from my part of the equation. Rick did the heavy lifting, the early biking lessons when he had to hold her up, dash behind her and catch her as she fell. I didn't get involved until she could balance on her own and really just needed help with lift-off. But what I learned during the two days I spent helping her learn to start and stop was eye-opening in its own way. I kept offering her advice: "Make sure your front tire is facing forward. Pedal fast so you pick up some momentum. Get your pedal in ready position before you start." And she kept shrieking at me, "Stop telling me what to do! Let me just do it my way!" At first I attributed this to anxiety; she was frustrated wtih how long it was taking so she needed to vent the frustration by lashing out at me. But then I started to see it as something else. Maybe she was right. Maybe she really didn't need my advice at all. Maybe my advice wasn't actually going to help her learn any faster than if she just figured it out for herself.

After all, it wouldn't take too many launches with the front tire turned at a sharp angle before you realized that the process worked better with the tire straight, and it probably wouldn't take too much trial and error before you realized that pedaling fast made balancing easier. So maybe it wasn't just the need to yell at someone; maybe Holly really wasn't benefiting from my suggestions. Maybe this was something her own body needed to figure out on its own, physically, viscerally, not through my explaining it to her. And that may be a lesson that carries through at other times too, times that I want to explain things to her and she wants to just live through them and figure it out through trial and error.

Years ago, when my niece Phoebe was five or six, I remember accompanying her and her father, my brother-in-law Bob, to the cul-de-sac behind our house so that she could try out her new in-line skates. At first, her attempts appeared to me to be disastrous. Not only was she slipping and crashing and tottering and tumbling; she yelled at her father at every possible opportunity. "This doesn't seem like it's working very well," I commented mildly to Bob, but he was wiser. "Just wait," he said. "This is exactly how Phoebe picks up every new skill. She attacks it, you think it's never going to come together for her, and she takes out her frustration by yelling at me. Then all of the sudden...." And as he said those words, we both saw Phoebe gliding toward us, then accelerating, turning, and coming to a picture-perfect stop. "Like that," Bob finished.

I'm not sure I want to always be the sacrificial lamb in this scenario. I'm not sure I'm willing to be shrieked at by Holly every time she needs to learn a new skill. But I'm still delighted that she's biking now, and I'm wiser to the fact that my long-winded explanations of what she should do were useless to her. I gave her the opportunity to try -- I pumped up her tires, strapped on her knee guards and elbow pads and brought her up to the track -- and then she ultimately figured it out on her own.