On Bike Pegs

I'll never forget riding on bike pegs when I was a kid. I never had them on my bike, since they would have been pretty impractical. They were typically used for the BMX-type bikes that I eschewed in favor of larger mountain bikes. Still, they were fun to hitch on to for a jaunt up the street when I didn't feel like hauling my ten-speed out of the garage. I'm sure they served a much more technical purpose for those skilled enough to ride bikes competitively, but for me, they were good enough to just ride around on while some other kid did the work.

There was a park behind the house where I grew up, and before it was expanded with a panoply of sports fields, it was a couple of nature trails and a place for teenagers to experiment with sex, drugs, and probably hip hop; it was pretty low-key, all things considered. The neighborhood kids and I used to toss our bikes over the flimsy fence that bordered the park and our neighborhood and shoot up and down the empty trails as fast as our little legs could carry us.

One day, and the particulars naturally escape me, but I either did not bring my bike or had traded it with someone else, but I had a bike with pegs on it. Naturally I chose to use the bike in ways that could not be accomplished on my own personal transport: standing on the pegs and over top the crossbar and the seat. I would pedal to the top of the bunny hills that dotted the park's nature trails and coast down them in this awkward fashion. It was fun, different, and pretty dumb.

This was years ago, maybe even over a decade ago, so the remembered past is ultimately hazy at best, and at worst, probably misinterpreted beyond recognition. Nevertheless, I recall two things clearly about that day: the bike with pegs and the over-sized olive-colored khaki shorts I was wearing. As the afternoon wore on, i continued to get a little more brazen on the loaner bike. Before I knew it, I was flat on my back, looking up at spider webs and scatter shot sunlight.

I felt no pain after having been flipped over the handlebars of that bike. I dusted my preteen self off and got up to see a hole in my pants. A hole that happened to be the size of a regulation basketball. It made walking almost impossible. How had that even happened? The other kids I was with posited that it might have come from getting caught on the handlebars, or even just ripping as my legs spread out while I was in midair. Still, the aftermath was more detrimental to my existence than anything else. I emerged scratch-free, but with a gaping hole in my pants that was sure to have a negative effect on my emotional health in the coming moments.

For the life of me, I cannot remember what happened to me or those shorts after I was flipped over those handlebars. Even more importantly, I did not think that such a trivial incident knuckleheading around as a kid would have so much resonance on something that has happened to me as a young man.

I had never fallen in love with another person before, in a romantic sense. My loved ones were either there for me since birth or had accumulated over the years, as friends tend to do.

But then I did. Now I've been flipped over the handlebars and have stood back up with a gaping hole in me, only not in a pair of over-sized olive-colored shorts. So like that time so many years ago in the park, I woke up dusty and discombobulated.

And today, just like then, I don't know what to think.