Dear Girl Learning How To Ride A Bike

Dear Girl Learning How To Ride A Bike,

My first ex-boyfriend, while a decent man at heart, was mentally unstable.  I don't regret saying that, as he'd tell you the same exact thing.  Of course, it might not mean as much to you, seeing as how you've probably never had a boyfriend and are at least four years away from your first real, make-my-privates-tingle crush.

I speak so candidly to you because I feel like it would do you good. The best trait my parents gave me was the capacity to be vulnerable in a raw, wordy way-- and when I saw you, well, I can't explain it.  Something about watching you made me want to give that trait away, to you, and let you know it is okay to speak your mind.

But let's forget my selfish reasons for writing you, at least for the moment.  I would like to finish telling you about my ex-boyfriend, though, if that's okay.

Yes?  Good.  I'm assuming you nodded your head.  I wanted to ask you: when did you lose that front tooth?  Please tell me the dividends were greater than mine at your age?  I remember I got a quarter-- twenty-five cents!--when I was six.  My Mom was not happy with the hissy fit I threw and my anger toward the penny-pinching tooth fairy, but the next time I lost a tooth, I got two dollars.

Okay.  So my ex-boyfriend.  First, an ex-boyfriend is what you call a man who USED to be your boyfriend, someone you used to love, someone you used to hold hands with.  Do your Mommy and Daddy still do that?  Or do they live in different places?  Either way, this guy I'm talking about was someone that I dated when I was about 15 years old--much older than you are now.  And, believe it or not, we were together for almost two whole years!  I know, that's a long time.  But when you get older, you'll see that time moves differently.  Kind of like somewhere in between the time it takes for syrup to slowly drip out of a bottle on to your pancakes, and the time that it takes you to eat them.  Does that make sense?

Maybe that wasn't a good analogy.  Hmm.  Okay, I've got it: you know how on your first day back to school after the summer it feels like you simultaneously were JUST there and have also been gone for a very long time?  Simultaneously is a word to describe when several things are happening at the same time.  So maybe, when you go back to school--second grade?--in a few months, you will feel like summer was slow like molasses, and that it sped by like a motorcycle at the same time!

Frick.  Oops.  Fudge.  Fudge.  I told you earlier I have a way with words sometimes, but it seems like I'm not doing a very good job.  And I bet you're getting impatient.  Impatient is how someone feels when they really want something to happen, but it just hasn't yet.  Maybe like the way you've felt lately in learning how to ride your bike?  I bet your Daddy has seen you fall a bunch of times, and the only thing you want to do is stay up on those two wheels and shout, "HOORAY!" so everyone knows that you're a big girl.  So you're impatiently waiting for the moment when you've finally learned how to balance your weight atop that pink-spoked, tassle-handled vehicle of yours.

So this boyfriend I used to have.  I know, I know, this won't take long.  But this boyfriend I used to have-- he wasn't very nice to me.  Sometimes, when I did something he didn't like, his hands would turn angry and find my legs, or my shoulders.  More than a few times they found my face, and those times stung.  And when things or people get angry, even hands, they don't always know what they are doing because the only emotion they feel is sadness. 

I bet you didn't know that either--that when people get really mad about something, it is usually because they are actually really sad deep down in their bellies.  Maybe you've been teased at school before, and it has made you want to pull that stupid girl's ponytails off of her stupid head.  But it is actually because you were really hurt, really sad, that someone would antagonize you for no reason.  Antagonize is just a fancy word for tease, or pick on.

Most of the time we dated, I tried to turn those hands into happy ones.  I did that because I knew how it felt to be sad, and I didn't want that for another person.  But I did it more because I was scared of his hands when they turned angry.  And the hands always found me, no matter how hard I tried to hide!  And I was SO good at hide-and-seek growing up!  I would play with my older cousins for hours and hours in the summertime, only coming in to pee and grab an Oreo.  Anyway, it took me almost two years to realize that I was not magic, and that I didn't have special powers to turn sadness-anger into something that everyone can love and hug.  Instead, I decided to not be afraid anymore, and do my best to use my happy hands to make others smile, or laugh, or say "you're pretty neat!" 

The weird thing was that when we stopped holding hands, my hand actually felt like it had been empty for a long time, without another hand inside.   At the same time, I found myself feeling free, like I had been in time-out, or in the corner of a classroom for a very long time.  I felt like my life had gone by so fast and that I wasted so much time being afraid, but I also felt the way baby birds do after all that sticky stuff comes off and they learn how to fly.  I felt two different things simultaneously! (Now you can use that word at school and sound super smart!)

I think I wanted to tell you this story because I was reminded of it when I saw you twisting, struggling, on that two-wheeled rite of passage.  And I think I was reminded of it because I saw your Daddy there, too, standing at the edge of your apartment stoop while you tried your best to wriggle toward him on the sidewalk.

Your Daddy shouted, "The faster you go, the more balance you'll have!" at you while your nervous tires closed the seemingly large gap between you both.  And that's when I thought of my story, and knew I had to write to you. 

You see, parents aren't always right.  Well, I guess they are lots of times, but sometimes they are afraid to tell you the truth about things because they are afraid you'll get hurt.  That's such a gift! I bet your Daddy didn't want you to fall off of your bike and scrape your knee, so he was trying to get you to learn how to ride it the quickest way he knew how.  He was trying to protect you, and that means you've got a good Daddy.

At the same time, I wish he would have been completely honest with you.  In the make-my-privates-tingle way that I mentioned earlier.  I wish he would have said, "Baby!  It's okay to go slow, even if you fall!"  Because you will fall, even if you're going fast.  Balance doesn't come with speed, it comes with practice.  And that means you've got a bunch of cuts and bruises in your future--knees, shins, elbows, ankles, cheekbones.  Those scrapes will heal though, if you let them.

When you finally learn how to ride that bike of yours, you'll be so happy.  And years from now, when you've gotten really good at it, you can wheel around your suburb at dusk, when you're old enough to go out alone.  There will be lots of cars and pedestrians and fellow cyclists, but that's okay.  Just pretend you're in an obstacle course. 

As you pedal down the bike lane, I want you to smell the lilac flowers all around you (this will happen in the spring, of course).  You'll be so close to a low-hanging branch that you'll want to reach out and touch it, caress it's tiny petals.  And you will.  You will realize that you can ride with one hand, and wonder if you could take the other off too.  What if I can balance with no support?

If you find yourself thinking that, I want you to try and take your hand off.  Pedal steady, pedal strong.  Go slowly, raising those other fingers delicately toward the sky.  You'll get it if you go slow, I promise.  Extend all of yourself to the sky, the grey moon, and shout, "HOORAY!" at the top of your lungs.

You'll be scared.  More scared than you've ever been. 

What if I fall?  What if a car hits me?  What if I lose my balance?

Maybe you will.  Maybe it will.  But I know for certain that if you can release those hands, happy or sad or angry--whatever they are at the time-- you're going to feel free.  You will feel open and fearless and petrified and alive and magical.

All of these things will come simultaneously, if you move slow.

Dear Celine Dion

Dear Celine,

I remember seeing Leonardo DiCaprio grace the covers of Tiger Beat and Bop when I was a pre-teen, thinking that he was not attractive at all.

What?

Unfortunately, I'm being serious.  Ashamedly, I would tell my friends he "just wasn't my type" and that I preferred the mugs of people like, say, Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, or Jason Alexander.  I guess this was the unfortunate part, but what excuse can I possibly give to make those crushes okay?  Funny guys were my type.  Fat, bald, short, toothy, goofy, Jewish.  If you could make me laugh, I'd fall in love.

And Leo just wasn't funny.  Of course, my tastes have changed: I'd now prefer Leonardo DiCaprio's corpse over any of those men, but who am I to judge?

Even though I was bumping around on the dirt path a mile behind the bandwagon, attached by a string around my throat, Leo did look pretty good in Titanic.  My Mom took me to see it in theaters when I was in sixth grade as part of an attempt to support a healthy relationship as my parents were going through a separation, and while I was at the time not yet ready to understand why people split up, I was ready to understand why people painted naked portraits of each other and made antique Fords drip condensation.

Plus, that song!  I swear to you I must have listened to it on repeat hundreds of times after seeing it on the trailers and previews, finding that it fit so perfectly with the fuzzed images sprawling across my aunt's uncharacteristically large tube television.   Because we lived there during that somewhat transitional year, I even had ample access to the Internet-- and was able to download it for free before Napster became taboo.

Epic.  Intense.  Climactic.  Everything a theme song should be, "My Heart Will Go On" was. 

And then I saw the movie.  How in God's name can the very song that drew people in and put asses in the seats not be featured in the movie?  Until the end, that is.  It was NOT featured in the famous "flying" scene, it was NOT featured while Kate Winslet showed off her incredible nude body and her more incredible lip mole, and it was NOT featured when Jack and Rose clung to shards of ship-wood, cold-blooded, afloat in the Atlantic Ocean.  It WAS featured as the credits rolled, informing me that Billy Zane played Rose's asshole husband-to-be, and that Kathy Bates (though totally underappreciated in said role) shone as the steadfast and headstrong Molly Brown. 

I already knew those things.  What I had hoped to discover is where James Cameron would strategically place snippets of the song, especially the last intense, building chorus.  I didn't go to the movies to spend four hours with my mother; I went to finally put concrete images to the song that had played in my head for months (and to hopefully change my mind about Leo).  I left with a sour taste in my mouth and slept on the top bunk in my cousin's room that night, squished next to my little brother, wondering why I had wasted so much of my eleven-year-old precious time.

Last week, I ran a relay race from Madison, Wisconsin to Chicago with twelve other people.  Non-stop, we slept in nap increments in random locations-- there was a gym, a YMCA, and the car we were riding in if we were lucky.  Our seven-person Flex-o-Fun vehicle was blessed to run the deep overnight legs of the race, from about 1am to 5am.  Exhausted, we scarfed trail mix and quinoa salad with feta and red onion slices to pre-game before our miles. 

A fellow van member, the sister of my good friend, was the late-night DJ.  Yeah, we needed to pump up, but some people were trying to rest.  We settled on a mellow playlist, everything from Jack Johnson to Ray LaMontagne-- and then you came on.

Low rumblings, hints of a thunderstorm, sound-effecty noise fogged up the windows.  An epic, intense, and climactic song that Laura, my new stranger-friend and I could car-karaoke to.  Not the "theme" song of Titanic, but another heart-wrenching, explosive power ballad: "It's All Coming Back To Me Now."

This song, I knew, was NOT featured in a major motion picture starring two Hollywood diamonds.  It was NOT a recommended track in the "Hot Music!" section of Tiger Beat.  And it surely was not on any of my burned CD's amongst the other songs I illegally downloaded via my aunt's telephone connection.

It WAS echoing through our new "house"--trailer, rather--when I was twelve, playing through my Mom's black, 5-disc-changer Sony stereo on a Sunday night before my first day at my new school.  And it WAS on right then, at 2:13 am on a Saturday morning, while young women napped and ate and laughed about things they didn't yet understand.

Oddly enough, Jack and Rose streamed through my head (those bastards), but they looked a little different--more like the ghosts of sandbox playmates and faux-Santa Clauses.

I saw a balding man, nearly fifty, with a crooked nose and smiling eyes with no reality to match.  A dyed-blonde woman, not yet forty, with a daringly short haircut and a tender beauty mark on the tip of her nose.  No wood splinters, just sheets.  No Heart of the Ocean to grace an otherwise blank, milky canvas, but a trio of diamonds glinting in the light of an alarm clock radio.  And their shivering was not from freezing water settling into their veins, but from the realization that something had sunk, and no submarine or amount of children could stop cursive imprints on stacks of paper.

There would be no pictures of these people, now strangers, on the covers of Cosmopolitan or Glamour--the magazines I'd read when I'd grow older; however, I would later have to decide how attractive I found them, especially when I was in my early twenties.

In that moment, as four tires held the inevitable fatigue and weight of the hearts inside, I saw the same shapes I did when your voice clung to the tack of freshly applied wallpaper: faceless heads with desperately hopeless limbs clutching to the shadows on the walls of a mobile home bedroom.  This was before the credits rolled.

So, you see, Celine-- you've really got some powerful pipes.  Canadian or not, I'd put you on my soundtrack.