The Mystery Bike

We take so much for granted. I never saw my dad on a bike. In fact, I never saw him touch a bike. Bikes were for kids and one thing he wasn’t was a kid. He had a tough life, my dad, and I’m not sure when his childhood ended, but it was young. The eldest son of Portuguese immigrants from the Azore Islands, he grew up during the Depression in the rugged, hardscrabble town of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he and his four siblings dug clams and snails just to survive. His father was a carpenter and a drinker and he believed that the only way to get through to his children was to use the back of his hand, or better yet an unfinished chair leg, and my father, as the first son, bore the brunt of it.

My dad started working in his early teens, fought to stay in school against his father’s demands, and eventually escaped into the Marine Corps. Stationed in Washington, D.C., he met my mom, a secretary with the Marines who came to D.C. for the post-war boom. They married, moved into a garden apartment, saved and scraped and bought a split-level ranch house in the suburbs with a low-interest Veterans Administration loan, had me, and settled into a life of church and neighbors and weekend house projects. Bikes? Bikes were as much a part of his vernacular as the lunar modules then landing on the moon. I asked for a Sting-Ray and got a ten-speed and I honestly don’t think he knew the difference. A bike was a bike.

The rest of his life was good by almost anyone’s standards and, given his upbringing, a miraculous blessing. He was the only member of his family to earn a college degree, acquired at night after leaving the Marines. He became a mechanical engineer and then worked for the Postal Service for thirty years designing letter-sorting machines. From the outside, it was an unremarkable life, perhaps. But seen from the inside, my father lived with heroic perseverance, a man who was given so little and treated so poorly but who made himself, who made a marriage and a career and a family and a life that was what his childhood was not.

A while back, my mom sent me a photo. It’s actually tiny, just an inch on its longest axis. She was in the process of leaving that split-level house to move across country and be near her grandkids, and she’d started sifting through a lifetime of accumulation. The photo fluttered out of a stack of paper and pictures with no real provenance. There’s nothing written on the back, nothing identifiable in the picture to pin it in place or time, but I’ve studied it again and again to try to tease its mystery into fact.

I’m not good at guessing ages and don’t have many pictures of him until after he left home, so my best shot is that he’s in his mid-teens, dating this to 1940 or so. The bike, though, is the real mystery…is it his? I never heard about him owning a bike. The few happy stories from his youth revolved around the ocean, the comfort and sufficiency of living along its shores, not around recreation. Trying to live was adventure enough. Could it have been a birthday present? For such a strapped family, it seems far-fetched. Did he buy it with money saved from his job setting up pins at a bowling alley at night?

It’s impossible to tell; my mom doesn’t know and there’s no one else left to ask. It will remain a mystery, and that’s okay. Out of all those bits and pieces of their lives, the Christmas cards still saved from the 1960s and matchbooks from the 1950s and old records and spy thrillers in the bookcase, this one tiny scrap of paper came to me and it shows my father on a bike. It’s my dad, on a bike, he’s young, and he’s smiling. Other than having him here, to wish him happy Father’s Day or tell him happy birthday or just celebrate time together, there isn’t much that could make me more joyful, to know that at some point he knew the freedom of balance, and motion, and the world opening before him with his own two wheels.