The Anna Karenina standard of biking is this: Everyone who erudite
how to journey a bicycle did so in roughly the same boring way; anyone who made
it to adulthood without education required a unique series of roadblocks,
failures, inattention, and procrastination. If you fall into the last group,
congratulations! Your inability to do something most children have mastered
makes a great conversation-starter. But your invented story of finally having
tamed the wild, geared stallion will make an even better one. There’s no sexy disturbance
in my past that kept me from learning: no 10-speed mowing down my parents in facade
of my eyes, no bike-mounted bullies menacing me for my lunch money. It just
never happened for me. I grew up in an apartment with a lack of storage space
space in a bike-unfriendly neighborhood in a bike-unfriendly city, so tottering
on training wheels down my block wasn’t an option. My parents know how to ride,
but rarely did, and they either never got around to teaching me or gave up on
me when I was too young to remember. In college, where my deficiency made me an
object of inquisitiveness, attempts by friends to teach me were made under
less-than-ideal situation, i.e. while we were all very drunk. Those attempts
went poorly. By the time I reached my mid-twenties, I just kind of unspoken
that if it hadn’t happened, it wasn’t going to. Even when I turned 31 earlier
this year, I couldn’t ride a bike with any level of confidence, couldn’t stay
on that bastard for more than a few feet without wobbling, with visions of
veering into oncoming traffic flashing before my eyes. “Killed Trying to Learn
to Bicycle,” the headlines would read, “Like a Pathetic bungling Baby.” I was
ashamed of my inadequacy, but you shouldn’t be. It’s just a non-vital skill
that most people have learned but others haven’t. Just because the alternative
is a above all small one doesn’t make it a failure of quality.
