What is the story/Do you remember when you first learned to ride a bike?

[WaveCapsByOscorp™]

i'm a little embarrassed because i didn't learn how to ride a bike until i was in my 20s

i use to have a bike when i was in 1st grade but my parents put it in storage and we moved and we never got it out, so i was just starting to learn but never got that much time. how i ended up learning was a girl i was close friends with was borrowing my roommate's sister's bike and she asked me why didn't i have a bike. once i told her why she was like "i'm gonna teach you how to ride a bike " so, after eating some lunch, we went out to this parking lot and she was giving me a demonstration on how to do it, then this girl told me to get up on the bike and she'll push me.

i was like

she's all lanky and shyt and i'm a big dude and, more importantly, i was worried about people watching, i didn't wanna look like a fool and all. but either way, since she's a passive aggressive girl, i went ahead and did it that way. honestly, i really didn't even need her help, once i got on the bike, i quickly realized how to do it. see the thing was, when i was younger, i always thought you had to maintain your balance without moving, but the key to maintain the balance was to move. so, since i hadn't attempted to ride a bike in almost 15 years after that time, i still had the same perception in my head...

 

[aqualung]

My older sis and I were spending the summer at Gram's house with cousins. Maybe 5 lil kids total -- 3 girls, 2 boys. I was 5 or 6 years old max.

We 5 cousins vacationed at my grandparents' house all summer cuz NONE of our parents wanted to be bothered with us, but our grandparents thought we were sooooooo cute. By day #2, my grandmother would kick all of us lil kids out of the house into the backyard while she cooked and cleaned and laundered and did hair in her at-home salon and gossiped and prepared vocal selections for church and nagged my grandfather and etc.

Iono who bought the bike. I don't recall being excited to get a new bike. A then teen-aged uncle assembled said bike with training wheels.

My sis and cousins encouraged me to peddle and balance. They would hold the bike up and push me along. They would lecture. Everyone said that it was **Very Important** that I learn to balance it before we removed the training wheels. I don't recall caring about balance while I had the training wheels. There were no knee pads or helmets cuz it was the '80s.
FINALLY, someone took off the training wheels. (I had decided that they were baby-ish.) I fell and scraped my knees and was afraid to ride fast or far. I kept at it with the help of the lil kid coalition. I could ride a bike by the end of the summer. When our parents arrived to collect us, my sister and cousins and teen uncle took all the credit.

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I remember that during that summer, I enjoyed mostly drawing with sidewalk chalk and dancing in the exhaust fumes of my maternal grandfather's Oldsmobile. He was constantly repairing that ancient gd car or showing his elderly ass friends from the steel mill that it DID INDEED run after all. I would dance in the exhaust cloud that emitted from the tail pipe while the car idled...until an adult would yank me out of the pollution cloud and remind me to breathe clean air, child, CLEAN AIR. I don't recall that piece of shyt Olds being driven much that summer. I'm sure we used it for trips to church or the grocery, but I was only concerned about dancing in the Oldsmobile's exhaust fumes...
*sad smile*