They Say You Never Forget

Everyone says that once you learn to ride a bike, you never forget.

This happens to be a lie.

The second-to-last last time I rode a bicycle I was eight years old. It was about 7:30 on a nice spring evening. My parents were out at a show, and my babysitter and I were racing our bikes around the loop. I grew up on a street that formed a closed loop, far from the rest of the suburbs of our tiny town. The parents loved it for its isolated security, and the kids loved the fact that it was a literal racetrack.

Any time I went out of the house on wheels, be they bicycle or rollerblade, my mother insisted on strapping me into a full suit of armor. Hard plastic knee pads, elbow shields, cast-like wrist braces, a helmet recalling a cosmonaut’s. I looked like a robot, was teased mercilessly by the other kids on the street and was terrified to go too fast because obviously I was in mortal danger.

Gradually the fear dissipated and I was able to display a level of confidence and skill on wheels that I was allowed to leave the elbow and knee pads at home, and sometimes even rollerblade without a helmet. I still chose to wear the wrist braces, knowing how a person actually breaks a fall, and on a bike a helmet still felt like a reasonably good idea.

Anyway, there I was at 7:30 on that pleasant spring evening, racing around the loop with my babysitter. I had no fear whatsoever, and cranked the gears to their fastest and pedaled as hard as I could.

My neighbor’s curb appeared out of nowhere, at a velocity I had never seen before. I tried to steer, but either the mechanism stopped working or I was suddenly paralyzed with a horrid realization of oops.

My front tire hit the curb, I went fully airborne, and landed head-first on my neighbor’s driveway. Here’s where I apologize to my mother for making fun of the robot suit she made me wear, because the simple fact of the matter is had I not been wearing a helmet, I would have died. As it happened I was physically unharmed but emotionally terrified. Everything was deadly after all. I couldn’t let my guard down.

The next day, I guess for exposure therapy, my mom took me on a mile-long bike ride to our local park. I think the steepest hill was at about a ten degree incline and I wore out the brakes from squeezing them with all my might every two seconds. Never mind, back to the house we go. The bike gathered dust for the next twenty years.

…

Then just the other day, finding myself temporarily in a city very unlike New York, I noticed that not only was it a more human-scaled city and infinitely more pleasant to live in, but the urban layout was perfectly suited to getting around by bicycle. Well aware of this, recent mayors have insisted on developing bike sharing programs and now every corner has a rack of bikes for rent, some you sign up for with a monthly pass, others you scan a code on your phone and off you go.

It was a gorgeous day, I had some time to kill, and I knew which direction I needed to go in. Well…they say you never forget, right?

I typed in my 24-hour-use numerical code and password, then struggled mightily to lift my assigned bike out of the rack. Were they always this heavy? I adjusted the seat to its lowest position and still had to clamber atop the damn thing as if it were a Clydesdale. Have I always been this short?

Popular wisdom may indeed say that once you learn to ride a bicycle, you never forget. But popular wisdom is not subject to the rigors of scientific observation or experimentation, it is subject to urban legend and wishful thinking, a diffusion of metaphor into reification and its associated prescriptive morality, finally creating a recollection of a Gramscian common hegemonic superstructure that…oh to hell with it, what I'm trying to say is I lost control of the bike after three seconds and wiped out in Piazza Gae Aulenti in front of the entire world, all of whom silently judged me. Who doesn’t know how to ride a BIKE?

The unfortunate thing is it’s only bad experiences that we never forget. I happily ate the baby corn in Chinese stir-fries for years without incident, then one morning hunched over the toilet in agony and I swore them off for life. One single betrayal of trust can spell the instant end of a years-long relationship. Memory is a mosaic in which the boldest colored tiles are the most painful things we can remember, and the everyday simplicity, pleasantness or happiness of things we take for granted is nothing but the caulk in between the tiles. It holds everything together and underpins the entire design, but you have to make an effort to see it.

Anyways, tomorrow I’m going back to the park to fall off a rented bike a few more times until I figure the fucking thing out.