Take Me Back Tuesday - Installment #1

Welcome to the first installment of "Take Me Back Tuesdays"!  Thought I'd share a little bit about the good ol' days once a week - you know, add a bit of weekly entertainment at my own expense. (I'm great at self-sacrifice.  Whatever it takes to get the job done, my readers.) This week I'll be sharing one of my handful of bad experiences I had while riding a bike.

I was driving the girls home the other day when we passed two boys tossing a football in their front yard.  Being the consistently talkative/reminiscent mother that I am, I immediately felt it necessary to tell the girls a story about the last time I watched boys toss a football in a front yard.  (By the way, my oldest would probably deny this, but I saw her look at them a little longer than usual.  Maybe she was trying to figure out if she knew the boys, but the fact remains that her head was held in their direction longer than my other two.)

So. I had a decent-sized crush on this guy.  Okay, I'm going to be truthful with you, my readers. It was a few guys.  But I was twelve - who was counting?  (Besides me and my boy-crazy friends, and our concerned parents, I mean.)  I'm not going to name names.  Nuh-uh.  I grew up in a very small town.  The process of elimination would take all of thirty seconds. But I will say this: most of us girls in town had a crush on this guy.    

I did have one thing working in my favor when it came to the boy-crazies.  I may have grown up in a small town, but I always went to school out of town.  Most of my peers had no clue who the heck I was, which sucked for the most part, but at times was pretty awesome, because it gave me free reign to ride my bike around town and check everyone out in their usual places.  I could then report even the most trivial information back to my BFFs.  ("He cut his HAIR!  His shirt was GREEN, like his EYES!  He was eating PIZZA!  Of course pepperoni!  What?  I don't know, he either said 'I'd like a Dr. Pepper' or 'Here comes the hot stepper.', I'm not sure." Yes.  We were that. Bad.)

My piano teacher lived about two blocks away from my house, so when the weather was nice I'd ride my bike to her home.  I had a little canvas bag the perfect size to hold three or four piano books, and would hang it on the right handlebar to and from my lesson.

One particularly warm day, as I was riding home from my lesson, my boy crush and another guy  were vigorously tossing a football back and forth in crush boy's front yard.  Shirtless.  Now, I wasn't old enough to fully appreciate their lack of clothing, but I knew that sort of juicy tidbit would make for a great story when I told my friends about it later at our "meeting".  

So there I was, riding my bike on the opposite side of the road, staring at the boys, oblivious to everything around me, when the right handlebar turned toward me suddenly and the corner of my canvas bag jammed into the spokes of the front bicycle tire.  

 My canvas bag fell to the ground, the bike on top of it, and as the truck's alarm rang out loud and clear, saying "Look at me!  Look at me!  I've been hit!  This girl's embarrassed!  Look at her too!" (in car alarm language - I'm convinced of this), both boys looked over at me immediately.  

I was mortified.   I didn't care about the pain in my shin, the dent in the side of some stranger's truck, I almost didn't even care about my bike (the only reason I did was because I had to ride it home - what's more mortifying than crashing your bike into a truck in front of two good looking boys?  Having to walk your bent-up bike home after crashing your bike in front of two good looking boys.)  All I cared about was the possibility that those two boys, who had no clue who I was, would forever see me around town and refer to me as the "weirdo who crashed into the truck across the street".

I finally looked at my leg when I got home.  There was minor damage, at most.  But my pride, oh man, my pride was a different story.  (I don't remember much about the status of my bike, but I know I rode it around for at least another year after that, so it must have survived the crash with minor scrapes and bruises.)  

It didn't take long for me to tell my mom what happened.  And do you know what she said?  She said I should go back down there and tell the truck owner that I was the one who'd crashed into his truck.  That I should apologize for putting a dent in it and taking off without telling them what happened. I mean really.  Did I go?  Heck no.  What if the boys were still out there in the front yard?  Can you imagine how embarrassing that would have been?  No.  I could not ride my bike back over there.

I didn't ride down that block again for months. Going an eensy bit out of my way was just fine by me, long as I didn't have to see either one of them again.  But I did tell that story at our next "meeting", in all it's mortifying glory.  And I told it to my kids (minus the not going back to the truck and apologizing part, of course) almost twenty years later.  The only difference was, my friends thought it was hilarious.  My kids thought I was a dork.