Bicycles

Piano Quartet in A Major, Op. 30; Quatuor Kandinsky

All three of us kids learned how to ride a bike on an old rust colored bicycle. I don’t know where it came from; I don’t remember when we never had it; and I don't know where it went. I would guess that K. used training wheels when she learned. D. and I did, for sure. When each of us learned how to ride a bike with only a front wheel and a back wheel, Mom and Dad awarded us with a new bicycle. I think that K.’s was purple with a basket in the front. Mine was gold. D.’s was yellow, I think, also with a basket in the front.

We used them mostly to ride up and down the driveway, maybe out to the intersection and back. When we had Bible School in the summer, we would often ride our bikes the mile and a quarter into town, armed with bibles, lunches and Shasta soda pop. Riding into town was easy. Coming back home was a burden. It hung over my head all day long. Two hills, the second one larger than the first, took up the first third of the mile of gravel road that led back to our farm.

Eventually, K. got a green ten-speed. A few years later, D. and I got Schwinn five-speed bikes. D. got a red one, I got a blue one. I used mine mostly to visit my friend S. who lived two miles away.

One time, a couple of punk neighbor kids stole our bikes, only a half hour after we last used them. As soon as we noticed that they were gone, Dad, Mom, D. and I jumped in the pickup and followed the trails that the bikes had made on the gravel road going east of our farm. We caught up to them within a mile or two. I don’t think those two boys regretted the punishment they received from their parents nearly as much as the tongue-lashing that D. gave them on the spot. She … she was mad. The poor, thievin’ scoundrels. God bless ‘em.

I took my five-speed to college and used it mostly to ride to “Pride of the Dakotas” marching band practice from my dorm. When I took a job as the organist at the Presbyterian church in town, I rode my bike to choir rehearsals and worship services, whenever weather situations warranted. Before packing up to go home, following graduation in 1988, I gave my bike to someone who needed one for the summer.

K. was the one who took to biking. She would take long bike rides on Sunday afternoons and summer evenings. When she played catcher on the Bank of Bruce women’s softball team, she always rode her bicycle into town for practice and to catch a ride to the games. Now and then, Mom and Dad would decide to drive up to Estelline to visit Grandma. K. frequently would ride her bike the eleven or so miles to Grandma’s, leaving about a half hour before we did. While in college, K., like D. and me, had an episode with a bicycle thief. Thankfully, like D. and me, she got her bike back.

I barely remember our music history and literature instructor at SDSU mentioning the name of Ernest Chausson, a French composer from the Romantic Era. We didn’t talk about him much since his output didn’t change the direction of music like Beethoven’s did. Yet, it’s beautiful music.

Mr. Chausson fulfilled his obligations to his father by going to law school and taking on a job as lawyer for the Court of Appeals. But, truth be told, he cared more for art and music, and started composing at the age of twenty-five. In 1886, his peers made him secretary of the Societe Nationale de Musique and he regularly received artsy visitors in his home, the likes of Gabriel Faure, Claude Debussy and the painter Claude Monet. He only published thirty-nine works during his lifetime. But all of them of consistently high quality. In June of 1899, he acquired distinction as, most likely, the world’s only major composer whose demise was brought about by virtue of a bicycle accident. He lost control of his two-wheeler as he rode on a downhill slope, slamming straight into a brick building and perishing immediately.

Sometime over the bicentennial weekend in 1976, some poor fellow on a bicycle failed to look both ways before entering an intersection in Rochester, Minnesota, and became a fatality. My sisters and I arrived in Rochester on Monday, the fifth of July, for a week’s vacation with our Uncle A. and Aunt J. We were given free reign with their bikes for the week. Uncle A. had, apparently, given the “bicycle lecture” to their son R. in light of the accident that weekend. For whenever D. and I suggested to our cousin that we take a quick ride around the block on the bikes, little five-year-old R. would put on this face of profound dolefulness and despondency, declaring, “I don’t know. I gotta think about that guy.” So, we’d let him think about him for about ten seconds or so, and then ask, Shall we go? “Okay.”

Credits: To Kermit the Frog, who barely escapes getting flattened by a steamroller by jumping off of the bike and onto the steamroller during the beginning moments of “The Muppet Movie”, only to proclaim, “That’s pretty dangerous building a road in the middle of the street. I mean, if frogs couldn’t hop, I would have gone with the Schwinn.”