I Can Do This

I sat on the front porch step with my chin in my hands and an enormous scowl on my face, as I watched the other children gleefully riding their bicycles down the street. My heart was positively green with envy.

Granddaddy carefully eased himself down on the step beside me, using his hands to position his aching legs before him. His legs were not much longer than mine, for Granddaddy was shorter than most of the women in my family. Yet, in my memory, my Granddaddy looms like a giant.

“Why are you pouting, Little Bit?” he asked.

“Not poutin’,” I muttered, as I thrust my lower lip out until I looked like a Ubangi woman I had seen in one of Grandmommy’s National Geographic Magazines.

“Oh,” he said, nodding wisely. “Then, why aren’t you out in the street riding bicycles with the rest of the young ‘uns?”

My face crumpled and I choked back tears as I whimpered, “They make fun of my training wheels!”

And, they did, dadgummit. My beautiful new bicycle — the first bike I ever had — was a birthday gift that year. It was a “nifty” shade of blue with silver flecks in the paint. From the handlebars, a rainbow of vinyl streamers flowed in the wind — or would have if I could get up any speed on training wheels.

That bicycle sat in the garage most of the time, because all the kids on the block laughed at me. They were goaded onward by my little sister! Two years younger than I, yet she had thrown away the training wheels over a year ago! I cringed in shame at the indignity of it all.

I simply had no sense of balance and was terrified of pain. I had asked my Daddy to teach me how to ride without the training wheels, but he didn’t have time. “And,” he reminded me, “your little sister taught herself to ride. You can, too.”

But, I couldn’t! I was embarrassed to try.

That bright Easter Sunday afternoon, my Granddaddy gently touched my knee and whispered, “I can teach you to ride without those darned extra wheels.”

Granddaddy hauled himself up from the porch and limped at a gallop toward the garage, with me running to keep up with him. My Grandfather never “walked” anywhere — he always ran. Momma said it was because he was always anxious to see what was around the next corner.

Granddaddy’s knees and feet ached most of the time, but it wasn’t because of rheumatism. He had limped since he was a young man. In his youth, he had worked at an ice house. Huge blocks of ice, weighing fifty pounds, were shoved down a chute to where my Grandfather stood. His job was to pick up each tremendous ice block with tongs and transfer it to the ice wagon. He had to work quickly in the Texas heat.

One day, he slipped in the puddle of water that had formed at his feet. That block of ice he held in his tongs landed on his foot and crushed it. Medicine being what it was in those days, Granddaddy’s foot wasn’t set properly, and it never healed. Although it hurt him all the time, my Granddaddy never let a limp stop him.

As I look back on that day, I realize that my Grandfather wanted to be “useful” as desperately as I wanted to ride on two wheels. He lived with Grandmommy and my aunt, who were good women, but very domineering. “Clucking hens,” Granddaddy called them. He was almost a generation older than my Grandmother, who was as old as Methuselah, and she treated him as if he were a bothersome toddler — underfoot and in the way.

In the garage, Granddaddy rummaged around for a screwdriver and removed those heinous training wheels. I pushed my bicycle into the street. With Granddaddy holding the seat to steady me, I climbed onto my bicycle.

The bike seemed to shiver. My eyes grew wide and round. “I can’t do this, Granddaddy,” I shrieked.

“YES, you CAN,” he said. ” Little Bit, “can’t” never did anything. Say, ‘I can do this.’”

Over my protests, my Grandfather soon had me chanting, “I can do this…I can do this…I can do this…”

“Let’s go then,” he whispered in my ear. “Let ‘er rip.”

With my Granddaddy holding the seat, I tentatively began to peddle. As my bike and I wobbled down the street, my Grandfather limped along beside me, huffing and puffing all the way. He held the seat to steady me and encouraged me to keep saying, “I can do this.”

He cried, “Pump faster, let’s go!”

With every ounce of my strength, I pumped those pedals. The colorful streamers flowed in the wind. I laughed and shouted triumphantly, “Granddaddy, I CAN do this!”

It was at that moment that I realized that my Grandfather was standing in the middle of the street a half a block behind me. I immediately lost my balance and smashed to the ground.

Before my tears could form, before I could begin to wail, my Grandfather was at my side. He picked me up, dusted me off, kissed my bloody knee, and put me right back on the bicycle. Over and over throughout that day, he limped down the street with me. Over and over, he picked me up and put me back on the bicycle. Throughout the whole afternoon, he made me chant, “I can do this.”

By golly, he was right. Before the end of the day, I could ride nearly as fast as any of the rest of the kids. I hadn’t mastered turning the bicycle and riding at the same time, but I knew I could do it.

My Grandfather taught me how to ride a bicycle that day, but he taught me something much more valuable: Attitude makes all the difference.

These many decades later, I sometimes find myself struggling to accomplish simple tasks: parallel parking a Ford Econoline van, entering code in a WordPress blog, trying to open a stubborn jar with my crippled hands. As I do these things, I find myself muttering, and I hear a voice in my head saying, “I can do this.”

That voice is my Granddaddy.

*************

This post is an entry for Scribbit’s Write Away Contest. The topic is “First Bike,” and I’m betting you have some memories of your own. If you would like to enter, the deadline is Wednesday February 18th. Visit her site to get the rules.

Do you remember your first bicycle? Was it as pretty as mine?

Related posts:

1. Worm Whisperer
2. Only The Caretaker
3. Up, Up, And Away
4. The Carpenter
5. San Francisco 101

Tagged as: first bike, Granddaddy, life lesson, Memories, philosophy, writing contest