Richard Reiss

I don’t remember when I learned how to ride a bike. I imagine my father taught me, at least that seems to fit the profile of a kid growing up in the 1960s. I do remember the street where I learned to ride and its 10 white houses all identical except for the color of the shutters. Ours were blue. The neighbors’ were yellow, green and black. What I remember most from that time is a sense of freedom and adventure that soaring on two wheels created whenever I placed my feet on the pedals and began to move forward.

My bike was red and, most likely, a hand-me-down formerly belonging to my older brother. I rode it all the time, riding as much as I could whenever I could. I never went far, but when you’re a child it’s a long way to the end of the block.

I was confident on my bike and still am. After a while, I got cocky and decided to take the next logical step for a 6-year-old cyclist, which was to ride hands-free with arms extended like the wings of a hawk as if I were about to take flight. I got pretty good at the no-hands thing and did it often. But one time — it only takes one time — after a few minutes of hands-free riding, the bike began to wobble, and so did I.

Seconds later, I was lying in the middle of the street in tears, the bike covering me like a stiff metal blanket. My best friend Mike lived two houses up from mine, and his dad was cutting the grass when my face connected with the road. He saw what happened, saw me lying on the ground covered by wheels and steel, and rushed to help me. Less than a minute later, I was in his arms as he began running to my house.

When we got there, he found my dad, who looked at my mouth and noticed that my formerly straight front teeth weren’t straight anymore. The fall had pushed them back considerably and the new position of my teeth made it nearly impossible to close my mouth.

Our family dentist, Dr. Rubenstein, was a friend of my dad’s. They played golf together every Wednesday morning. I remember thinking how great it would be if someday I had a job where I could skip work one morning a week to play golf. Forty years later, I did. But, just like my dad, I was never very good.

My dad rushed to the phone and called his friend. Twenty minutes later, I was sitting in the dentist’s chair, tearful and nervous. Dr. Rubenstein assessed the damage, had a brief and private conversation with my dad and then, unceremoniously, removed my two front teeth.

Losing a couple of teeth was hardly enough to make me stop riding my bike. As the years went on, I continued riding with my friends, looking for adventures, meeting up with other boys and sometimes girls, and sometimes, well into my teens, riding through the woods and hills to get drunk on beer or wine or both just because we could.

And then I put my bike away and life took over. College and jobs and children got in the way of the joy of cycling until many years later — well into my 50s — I began to ride again.

Just like before, it was wonderful. And just like before, I had an accident, although this time I was hit by a car. The car was turning left. I was going straight. Apparently, I was unseen. With only seconds to react, I pressed hard on the brakes, fell to my side and slid beneath the frame of a large SUV, its rear wheels crushing the bike and stopping an inch from my ankle. The bike was trashed, but I was fine.

A few years later (on my new bike), I got hit again. It happened on an open road that was straight and flat. The driver drifted slightly to his right (I was once again unseen) and struck me on the elbow with the car’s sideview mirror. I was keeping a pretty good pace at 19 miles an hour, but the car was doing 50. The rest was physics. I flew through the air and landed hard on the ground, relieved that I had not hit a tree or telephone pole. Thankfully, the bike wasn’t damaged, but the next day my right side was black and blue from my ankle to my shoulder.

What was odd about the accident was not that I was hit for a second time. As the saying goes, accidents happen. As this accident happened, my mind was on my mom. She was 88 and had been seriously ill for several weeks. When I was struck by the car, I was writing her eulogy in my head. Yet, for the few seconds I was soaring through the air, I thought “Mistake! The eulogy I should have been writing was my own.”

A few days later, mom passed away. As I delivered the eulogy, I couldn’t help but think about the irony. I was, of course, sad about her passing but happy, too, to be at the funeral and not in a hospital (or worse) attending to my own injuries.

I’m not sure what any of this means other than I’m either brave or stupid to keep riding my bike. In my mind, the probability of fun still outweighs the possibility of danger. But it’s also one of the few threads in my life that connects a 6-year-old boy to a 68-year-old man, and that alone might just be worth the risk.