First Bike: Happy National Poetry Month!

Remember learning to ride your bike? Minnesota poet Dave Healy has captured the experience with poignant precision.

First Bike

At Montgomery Wards the bikes and trikes
were segregated and arranged by size.
My father made a deal: I could have
the biggest trike or smallest bike—
no choice at all for any five-year-old.

When we got home he got a wrench 
and attached the training wheels. 
I rode that four-wheeler for a year
or so until one day my father said
“I think it’s time to take then off.”
He got a wrench and did the deed.

How did he know that it was time?
For when I climbed aboard the craft 
that had been shorn of its supports
I pedaled off as if I had been riding 
two-wheelers all my life.

Halfway down the block I stopped
and turned around. My father stood
there, wrench in hand, looking for 
the son who left him far behind.

                      ~ Dave Healy (c) 2018

See another of Dave's poems when he was featured last year here.

Goodbye Summer!

On this first day of fall, I want to share a few summer tidbits and revisit connections to a couple of books.

We had some great family times, including our almost-five-year-old granddaughter's first bike rides. She invited us to her house to watch her ride because the video on her mom's phone just wasn't enough.

Charles Ghigna covered this in his forth-coming book First Times. I blogged about that book here.
"The first time I help my mother go shopping.
The first time I ride my bike without stopping."

It was a proud time for all of us, and we were pleased to see our granddaughter's grit as she fell and got up again, learning to master the turns.

Another highlight was meeting Andrea Page, author of Sioux Code Talkers of World War II, and hearing her presentation based on her book. She packed our library meeting room, and people even came from other towns to learn more about this important topic. I blogged about the book here.

I'm thankful that Andrea and the family who traveled with her from Rochester, NY, had a great time in my state. You can see her remarks here, here, here, and here. And our tourism bureau did not pay her for any of these glowing reports!

What were some of your great times this summer? Bye, summer, and hello, fall!