Dating : The Reason Why Dads Should Teach Their Kids How To Ride A Bike

If my memory serves me right, I was about six or seven years old when my dad finally decided to take off the training wheels on my small, red bike. Me and that six or seven year old kid are different; you see, I’m not as careful then as I am now. I guess the longer you ride on this road we call ‘life’, the longer the distance you put between you and the person you thought was the real you. Within a few minutes I was riding just as fast as the older kids, the boys who didn’t mind scraping their knees just for the hell of it. But no matter how brave, how smart, how lionhearted I was, there was this one bump on the road, one tiny thing that made a memory that stuck with me for more than a decade, and within seconds I was on the dirty ground, elbows and knees scraped and there was blood; my first fall.

One of the things me and that kid still have in common is that we both don’t like attention, not exclusively but especially, from strangers. So I got up, wiped my elbows and knees, and swallowed the lump that was forming in my throat but my eyes gave me away. Tears were uncontrollably falling from them, they always appeared just as fast as I could wipe them. Other people were looking and I hated it.

I’m not the kind of person who is easily embarrassed nor am I shy. I guess it’s just one of those feelings that is hard to describe. The closest I could come up with are people who chew so loud that aliens are probably too grossed out to visit our planet.

But before I could take my bike and walk away from the curious crowd, my dad lifted the old thing and held it behind his head, he could’ve dragged it like a normal human being, of course he didn’t, he had to carry it like I think how a sociopath would do it, but not before he could laugh at my fall, it’s not as though it was the funniest thing in the world but it was the kind of laugh that says he was amused, like he was entertained.

I’ve told this story to a friend, she said my dad was kind of an ass and if that were her she would’ve cried even more, maybe even emotionally scarred. I raised my eyebrows at what she said, because when I saw my father laughing at her youngest daughter, covered in scrapes and bruises, I laughed just as hard, maybe even harder, than he did. He was, still is, the apple of my eye. Now that I’ve gotten older, I realize that my friend was right, my dad was an ass, but so was I (still am); that’s what I liked about our small family, the incredibly stupid things we found funny.

With his other hand holding the bike at the back of his head, the other one held my hand, ‘that’s okay, falling is okay’, he said with a smirk on his face. My puffy red eyes beamed as we talk toward home where my grandmother has food waiting, the best in the world.

And ever since that day, falling is okay.