The Canonical Penguin: New Bikes for Christmas

When I was about 10 years old, all I wanted for Christmas was a new bike. That’s it, just a new bike. Before this I had always been the recipient of hand me down, junk yard recycled, fixed in the garage bike. And we used them a lot. Even though my mother would not let us ride off the block, we rode them every day so bikes were important.

I can remember asking for a new bike and my parents being somewhat receptive to the idea. I can remember them taking me down the street to the big kids toy store “Kiddie City” (yes, kiddie city!) to look around. They were a precursor of Toys R Us, a large department style store, in somewhat of a warehouse type setting that had many different departments. These included the hobby corner (with stamps and coins), models (cars, boats, tanks, you name it), rows and rows of games, dolls, and even some kids clothes. And in the middle of the store, near the rear entrance was two long rows of bikes. Shiny chrome, brilliant colors, real leather seats, just lined up for looking at, each with a large price card shaped price card attached to them with string.

If you read my posts regularly, you might remember this one about crashing new bikes along the bay but those were new bikes we had bought with our own money and was several years later. These Christmas bikes were the first new bikes we were to ever get. At the store my brother Mike and I “tried on” several varieties, settling on shiny black Royce Union, 3 speed beauties. Yes folks, three separate speeds. I remember being so excited, that the time to Christmas seemed to crawl. It got there however and we raced down the stairs to look under the tree on Christmas morning and…no bikes. NO BIKES! At this point we could not say anything to our parents, and it’s not like we didn’t get other presents, it was JUST NO BIKES…

After a while of striping ribbon and wrapping paper off of the usual assortment of sock, pajamas and the like, my dad told us to go down to the basement to get some cans of vegetables for that days big meal. This was a usual activity for us, to be sent down to the basement to get some cans of something that was stored on a row of shelves down there (in case of atomic bomb attack I guess), and we dutifully did as requested. When we got the cans upstairs, I can remember my parents having a strange look on their face and asking if we saw them. “Saw what?” we replied and we were sent down to the basement a second time, to look. There, right next to the cans of food, were two brand new black 3 speed bikes. How had were missed them? I guess we were too disappointed to notice and now we were too happy to care.

We took them out the basement stairs and rode them all afternoon. Thank goodness it was our turn to host Christmas dinner (more about that tradition in the next post).