How to take flight

Hey Sam,

I took the training wheels off your bike yesterday. We crossed the road to the thin strip of park by the beach and, shaded by a tall column of pines, I held your shoulder while you rode. It was a procession of sorts, I guess. The trees rose high either side of us, fanning themselves into the blue and I held you tight, telling you to make me run.

I tried to release you. I wanted to. In my mind was the image of me letting go and you flying off, kind of like ET. Instead, every time I took my hand away you panicked and lifted your feet off the pedals.

After a short time you said it was enough. I convinced you to go one more time around the rotunda but you told me not to let go because it made you feel something, a word I couldn’t make out. It sounded like ‘skewered’. I got the drift though, you weren’t ready to ride on your own, so I ran beside you and we circled the small picnic hut and came back to where we started.

We finished, sat on the grass for a bit and I told you the sensations I have when I ride a bike, the feeling that the wind is passing through me, the turn and dip of the bike, the independence. That last idea seemed to resonate because I think you are missing your independence from us, now that we are all trapped together and your Mum and I are trying to be your teachers as well as your parents.

Riding a bike was the first thing I did that made me feel free. I didn’t learn to drive until I was in my twenties because I had no interest in it. I prided myself on my bike skills instead, able to beat friends in cars across town to parties. It was never a fair race. Part of the freedom I found on my bike was the freedom from rules.

I ran traffic lights all the time, cut through public spaces, dodged cars. I rode like the crow flies, slicing the city into the shapes I wanted it to be and carving through it as though the heart of it was soft.

I backed myself, riding through the centre of town in rush hour just for the thrill of it. I put all of my fearlessness into my bike, a classic steel framed white Peugot racing bike from the 70’s. I found it in a newspaper ad and it cost me $100. I named it Pegasus because in my mind, it was my winged horse and I was flying.

That’s the feeling I tried to describe to you. To take flight. Lift off. Defy the rules that bind us to this earth. That’s what I want for you, a flight that happens in the imagination, a moment when the rules you’ve been given (or more often than not, given yourself) no longer apply.

Because Sam, rules are malleable things, like cityscapes. You need to weave through them, avoid collisions, react spontaneously and carve your own path. Most importantly you need to find your freedom within their constraints.

This is probably not good parental advice, I have to admit. The greatest flight I ever took lifted off from the bonnet of a car when I was 16, after I cut a blind corner with my headphones over my ears, playing Violent Femmes ‘Why can’t I get just one…(censored)’. I flew past our school’s team bus which was waiting to turn, half my year’s football team were looking out the window. They saw it all, me hitting the car head on, my headphone cable detaching from it’s socket and whipping through the air behind me, my shoulder already dipping back down to earth as I crested the bonnet. The car I hit screeched to a halt and I caught their startled faces too, beneath the windscreen. All around me were faces pressed against glass, open mouthed, slowed to stillness, witnessing my flight.

After your first ride we sat on the grass beneath the tall pines and you told me how you felt when I took my hand away. You used the word again and I realised you meant insecure, not ‘skewered’.

When you let me go it makes me feel insecure. You repeated it.

Sitting on the grass beneath the pines, I looked up. There were parades of butterflies above our heads, passing down the parade ground of trees, blue and black wings beating at the air without sound. More butterflies than I’d ever seen, as though this virus that is striking us humans down is releasing nature from a set of rules and constraints.

I know you’ll learn to ride on your own soon and you won’t panic when I release your shoulder. I know you’ll find freedom and I think you might enjoy the feeling of the wind passing through you as you ride, just like me. Before too long we’ll be able to ride together and it won’t be too long after that, as the crow flies, that I guess you will be able to ride faster and further than me. When that happens I’ll have to let you go, even if it makes me feel insecure.

Love,

Ragnar.