The Excited Courage I Needed

The Excited Courage I Needed

Dad was very protective of me as I grew up. I saw his safety rules as signs of a mean Dad. Everyone was riding a bike. Except me. We lived at the end of a short driveway which veered off from a 300-foot lane. The neighbour children flew down this lane with their bicycles, and I could only watch them enviously and wistfully, not partaking, forbidden from riding a bicycle. Often, in the midst of those long summers, I sat at the edge of our yard watching them ride. They loved the attention my close observation gave them, and they pedalled fast and furious past me, knowing they were the object of my envy.

The winter I was eleven, five years after my sister died, my father surprised me with a bike. It was no ordinary bike that he had purchased it at a used bicycle shop and had hidden in a shed out back. Carefully, with his artist’s hand, he painted it light blue with white trim. He had even painted the handlebars and wheels with silver paint. I like to have died. My mother was tickled pink, and my dad was pleased as well. Dad had a reason for giving me the bike in the winter when I couldn’t ride it outside. He intended for me to learn the art of balance, mastering the bike in our small kitchen that winter so that when it became warm outside and I took the bike on the lane, I would not be made fun of by the neighbour kids. Instead, I would ride with them, competently. That my sense of balance on a bike and the dynamics between me and the neighborhood children mattered to Dad gave me the excited courage I needed to get up on that bike and practice hours in that small kitchen.

And so that winter’s activity began. While I remember childhood winters washed with a grey colour and filled with sweaty cement block walls, earaches, runny noses, and confinement in a tiny house, that particular winter when I learned to ride a bike in the kitchen is washed in gold light. Dad and Mom spent time with me in the evenings, helping me to get my balance, helping me “ride” the bike from the end of the kitchen sink to the living room couch. And I learned, wobbled and fell, but got back up and on the bike. The following summer, I rode a bike with the others, finally one of the gang. I was twelve years old.

The same scenario played out with ice skating. Our woods had a pond and was frequented by the neighbor kids in the winter. I could only go to watch. A mile away, church friends had a large pond on which young people skated. Again, we drove there in our car and watched. That same winter when Dad and Mom gave me the bike, they gave me a pair of skates for Christmas. The skates were white with gleaming silver blades. I was ecstatic. I held them, one at a time and rubbed my hands over the smooth white faux leather and the cold steel blades. I put them on my feet and practised walking in them, keeping my balance, on the kitchen floor. And one cold evening, Dad and Mom took me to the pond and walked, in their winter boots with grips, on either side of me as I took my tentative steps on the ice. They soon left me on my own as I teetered, fell, got up, teetered, fell, got up. Eventually, I skated on my own, gliding on that crystal surface of frozen water.

So it was that at age twelve, I was riding a bike in the summer and ice skating on the community pond in the winter. In addition, I was listening to the radio in my home! The radio was a new acquisition for our family when I turned eleven, and it became my gateway to the world, a way I could feel a part of a larger landscape, a potential place to belong. Mom and Dad provided the rules for listening to theologically sound programming.

When Mom and Dad were away and I was home babysitting my siblings, I turned those radio knobs to other stations, stations that carried the Beatles and other rock groups across the airwaves. “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” “Red Rubber Ball,” “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” sustained me, made me feel part of mainstream culture. My satisfaction was at an all-time high when I got on the bus in the morning, and heard the same songs coming from the school bus radio. Home and school were singing the same songs, thanks to my disobedience.

In the meantime, cultural literacy was passing me by. This troubled me. Our neighbours and my schoolmates had television. We did not. When I was at our neighbours, I disobeyed my parents and didn’t look the other way. I openly gazed at the TV running so generously in the room with hardly anyone watching it. All of this vigilance about our TV watching changed when Jack Kennedy was killed, my hero with his dashing good looks who resembled our church pastor.

The day of the funeral found Mom and me at Jenny’s house watching the funeral on TV. Apparently, one wasn’t struck by a bolt of lightning after all when one watched TV. Mom did not explain her rationale for taking us to the neighbours to watch TV, but her expression radiated importance, the importance of this national moment. She wanted to observe it, and she wanted us with her. At school, I was in the crowd who had seen it. All of us, including me, had seen the funeral of our young president. I was part of the gang, pulled out of my Conservative Mennonite roots, planted firmly in the outside world, and I was never going back.

Violet Dutcher

Professor Emerita