It was one of those father-son bonding things. Now, my dad never took me fishing, or hunting, or camping, or any of that, but what he did do was take me biking. We would bike from the house all the way to a pretty garden about a half hour away or so, through a lovely little bike trail. Nothing special in and of itself I guess, but the fact that my dad and I were going on an adventure was something that doesn’t really ever get out of your mind. Especially when you and your dad don’t go on those sorts of things anymore.
To be honest, I kind of dreaded those bike rides when I was little. I mean, I was kind of a husky kid, and my asthma was always a bother, and those hills…geez, to me it was like scaling Mount Everest every time we hit a bump in the trail. But as my father so delicately put it,
“Come on, pain builds character.” And so it did, I just didn’t notice it at the time.
We were on our way back home, riding side by side. I was ten or something. I was wearing a dorky helmet, and dad…his helmet was dorky too. I find bike helmets to be dorky in general. That’s another story. In any case, we were riding along and we had just ridden off this bumpy wooden bridge. It was the kind that echoed as you rode along it, making that ‘bumpity-bumpity-bumpity’ sound as your wheels thumped across each plank of wood. It was a brilliantly sunny day, with just enough refreshing wind to keep the heat from getting to you. The birds were chirping, the water below the bridge was babbling quietly, and I was with my dad. It was beautiful. Oh yeah, and there was the sound of me wheezing like an octogenarian smoker, but that doesn’t really add anything to the scene.
At the end of the bridge was a sharp right turn. My dad was on my right, so he turned first. I attempted to follow suit, but for whatever reason it just didn’t work out for me that time. Realizing far too late that my tires had lost their grip of the road, I was helpless as I teetered to the right and crashed into the pavement. Skin grated painfully against the road and limbs flailed all over the place. My bike, the no-good dirty rotten traitor, had somehow managed to roll into a tree off the road and fall gently into a pleasant bush. My dad was standing right next to me in a flash.
“Are you okay?” he asked, bending down to help me up.
I don’t know what it was in that one moment, but I was just so fed up with something or other that I cracked. Tears suddenly began flowing from my eyes faster than the blood from my elbows and legs. And right there, on a bike trip with my dad of all places, I had had enough. Refusing my dad’s hand, I got up on one knee, pushing myself to stand back up.
“Let me back up! Let me back up!” I yelled through bitter tears.
Looking back on it I feel a little sheepish. After all, it was just a bike accident. I feel now that I was being a little bit melodramatic. But I don’t know; I guess something inside me never liked falling down. I never found anything enjoyable about being on my back on the ground. I felt helpless. I felt like an infant. So I didn’t take my dad’s hand, and I picked myself up until I was standing once again at my full height. I was bleeding, I was crying, and I was still wheezing like an idiot. For whatever reason, right there, it was more important than anything else that I stood up on my own. It felt like that was where I was supposed to be. Standing.
Maybe that’s why when I was on the football team I tended to not let anyone help me up. Sure, whenever someone was seriously injured, we would always help them out, but for whatever reason, if I could stand, I did. And when we got home from the bike ride, I let my parents wash the wounds and put on the Lion King band-aids. For me, I needed to stand up by myself. ‘Cause, if you think about it, if you can’t get yourself up, is there anyone who really can? If you can’t give it your all, why should anyone else? There’s something so significant about getting up when you’ve fallen down, and in that one moment on that bike ride I think I realized it. When I fall down, I get back up again. The stuff I can’t do, I leave in the hands of the experts. But the stuff I can do? I’m going to do it with everything I’ve got.
I’m going to stand up.
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