A Christmas Memory

The wheels…they go round and round…

The year was 1950, and I was seven years old. It was Christmas time and my parents, my sister and I all bundled ourselves into our old Model A Ford, that was parked beside my home in San Angelo, Texas, and we went off to the home of MawMaw and PawPaw. They lived in Dublin, Texas-a small rural town about 13 miles West of Stephenville.

I always looked forward to trips to Dublin, and Christmas was always a magical time of year. Although nothing truly remarkable had as yet ever happened to me at Christmas--that was about to change.

When we arrived on Christmas Eve, we were met in the front yard by my grandparents, and we went in to have a pleasant evening in their house - a house which always had a special, comfortable feeling to me. It was very old and had faced the elements for years and had probably never been painted. The wood on the outside was old, weathered wood. Inside there was no electricity or running water and no phone. There were two bedrooms, a kitchen with an ice chest, and the stove was a gas stove. There was no sink. Of course the bathroom was an outhouse down a path through their garden. I made sure I had taken care of any outhouse needs before the sun went down as the trip out there alone in the dark could be pretty spooky.

I am sure that my two uncles and their families came over as they always did. They also lived in Dublin. There would have been conversation and frequently the playing of Bluegrass music on the fiddle. I don’t remember exactly how it went this evening, but eventually the day wound down.

When it came time to go to bed, I was given the couch in the living room as my place to sleep. I don’t recall any Christmas decorations, but there may have been a few simple ones. They blew out the kerosene lamp and they all went to bed. The car lights of occasionally passing cars filtered through the old, thin lacy curtains. I lay there watching these shadows as they traced their way around the room. I was finally lulled to sleep by the tick tock of the old pendulum clock on the wall.

I was awakened by someone the next morning and opened my eyes to see the most amazing sight. Right in the middle of the living room was this huge bicycle! I couldn’t believe it. Where in the world had that come from? Then wonder of wonders, it got through to me that this was actually my Christmas gift. I had no idea how in the world I was going to ride it, but that did not deter me from being very happy.

After breakfast my dad took me outside with the bicycle, and we went across the road to a caliche street that had an incline. When he put me on the seat of the bicycle, my feet could not reach the petals, so I had get off the seat and shift from one side to the other to take the petals around the full turn. The handle bars were so wide I could barely reach them with my arms out straight.

Of course I had never been on a bike before so when my father would get me to rolling and call out my instructions I went for quite a few major crashes, but I knew that sooner or later I would learn how to ride my bike.

I later learned that the reason I had received such a large bike was that my father, with his income of a carpenter, knew that not only was he limited in what he could get me for Christmas but he also wanted to get me one bike only. The bike I got was a used one from a cousin, and Dad had paid about $3 dollars for it. He had obviously stored the parts in the trunk of the car and put it together Christmas night. He was as happy to get it for me as I was to get it, which was an added plus.

Of course I did learn to ride the bike, and it gave me many good times. I tended to use it primarily like my virtual horse. In addition to using it to "play Indian" I would also go to extremes in learning to do tricks on it as if I were on a horse in the circus. Besides almost never riding it while holding the handle bars, trying to figure out how to ride it backwards (which I never learned), hopping off at full speed, running alongside, then hopping back into the "saddle" without slowing the bike down, my favorite trick was to standup up straight while standing on the flat rack above the back tire. Getting into the standing position and keeping it going for about half a block was fairly easy, but as the bike began to slow down, getting myself back onto the seat and in control with the handle bars was pretty tricky, and I took quite a few tumbles.

As one would expect, I finally rode my bike into the ground. I don’t know where its final resting place is, but I am sure it is still there in some fashion…bits of rusted metal under the earth. Along with it, within the earth, are also my father, my grandparents, and my two uncles. My grandparent’s old house has been torn down, and the new house that my dad and one of the uncles had built for them is also worn down now and occupied by strangers. My home in San Angelo, also built by my father, is run down and almost not recognizable.

But in this season of the winter solstice is the promise of the eternal return, the rebirth of spring, the return of the sun to its full glory. I have two grown children who have each received their bikes, and now three grandchildren who may just have some wheels coming their way when they are old enough.

And the wheels… they are going round and round....