MATT EDITORIAL COMMENT: In the past, I had tons of ideas of things to write about or do. I quickly learned that my power of idea generation was much stronger than my power of idea retention, and soon I began to write things down as soon as I thought of them. Now, my power of … er… whatever you call the power of hoarding lots of little scraps of paper holding literature or invention or blog ideas in drawers and folders and a wallet… my power of “that” is much greater than my power of actually acting upon those ideas. Well, baby steps, as Bob would say.

I’ll start trying to clear things out now. I just found a note with cryptic scribbles about bike riding, so I’ll do my best to interpret it.

Isabella still rides a bike with training wheels on it. That’s fine with me; I just want her to ride. She hasn’t ridden lately because her parents have been too afraid of heat stroke in the blazing Texas summer. Well, we’re finally having a break in the heat, so we may be headed back out soon.

It was hard to get her to transition from the tricycle. She had that tricycle down, except perhaps for the “don’t make a hard turn while going full speed lest you tump over (translation for non-Southern US English speakers: tump over = roll over or turn over)” rule. We finally got her off of it by transferring the little bell off of the tricycle and putting it onto the big bike, one of Madeline’s hand-me-downs that also included pompoms on the end of the handles and a basket in front and gratuitous amounts of pink. No boy would come within twenty feet of it.

That new taller bike was scary for her, especially because the training wheels that I’d put on there were of the cheap Walmart/Target/Kmart “one size fits all” variety. They didn’t quite fit, but luckily, the metal was so flimsy that I could just bend it to sort of fit, kind of. Then I put some zip ties and wire around it, to add a little redundancy – very NASA-like. If she stayed vertical and thus put no weight on the training wheels, the training wheels were rock solid. If she decided to lean to the side, well, then she’d better hope that her daddy had not yet passed out from running alongside her.

Finally we went to a real bike shop with real bikes and people with overdeveloped leg muscles who wore those biking shorts without shame and with training wheels of different sizes that were made of metal that was thicker than a pie pan. We rushed home and I dumped out the box to see that, yes, there were no screws or bolts. I was initially impressed, having recently learned of a sophisticated building technique that required massive design skills and absurd precision but no nails or screws. I was subsequently somewhat unimpressed when I read the instructions and learned that the things that were supposed to be in the box were in fact, not. Apparently the employee doing the packing had just gotten off his night job shift as a drive-thru restaurant worker. Eventually, though, we got the right hardware and the wheels were ready.

The hard part was getting Isabella to want to ride. We could get her to ride, but we could rarely get her to want to ride. Madeline had been the same way. I remember trying and trying to get her to ride a bike, that being one of the few physical things that I could teach her to do, her interest in soccer and softball being low and my abilities in round-offs and back-tucks being likewise lacking. We’d go out full of anticipation and excitement and we’d return with Madeline carrying her helmet by a strap while crying and me carrying the bike behind her while steaming. Then she wouldn’t want to try again for weeks. The only thing that had gotten Madeline motivated to ride without training wheels had been the sight of peers riding without them. Sometimes peer pressure is a good thing…

But Isabella didn’t care about that. She did, though, like to make up a little adventure when she rode, and I did get her to ride at times. She didn’t notice the new wheels, but I did because I had to run faster and I didn’t have to keep pushing her upright because these new wheels didn’t simply bend out of shape as she leaned.

Someday we’ll get her out there on two wheels instead of four. But for now, four is good. At least she’s out there riding.