When I was a little, and it was time for me to graduate from my small, pink, banana-seated bike, JP took me - and my sister Kate - to the local Schwinn dealer.

We were a Schwinn family. No other bike would do.

In the mid-1980s, in Joliet, there was only one bike that would do for a 10-year-old girl, however, and that was this 10-speed, pink and gray bike with the curled handbars, and I'll bet that there are some very lucky ladies out there who owned that bike. If so, I hate you. Because guess what? I couldn't have that bike. One, because it wasn't a Schwinn, and Two, because it was pink. JP wasn't buying us pink Schwinn's.

I could deal with that. It wasn't as though I was a horribly ungrateful child, and there were other colors I liked more. I was never much of a pink person anyway.

So we get to the dealer and I head straight for a similar bike, one that was fire-engine red, with ten speeds and curled handlebars. This was when I learned something else I wasn't going to be getting: a bike equipped with ten speeds and/or curled handlebars. The bike that my father and I settled on was a single speed, royal blue cruiser with upturned handlebars. And by "settled" I mean, "The bike I took before I ended up walking out of there with no bike at all."

(It kind of looked like this but a little more rounded, tubular and heavy. Seriously.)

I got teased a lot by my next-door neighbor Chrissy for that bike. She made all sorts of comments about how absolutely uncool that bike was, but I rode it because, you know, what else was I going to do? Walk? I could handle the color, the single speed, but I was so patently dorky riding around with those upturned handlebars. I might as well had the word "dork" painted on my back. All of my subsequent bikes were the same, with upturned handlebars, and I hated them all with a passion, because don't think the teasing stopped in grade school.

Oh no, when I road a bike to my after-school job, with the boy whose affections I'd longed to capture, I got teased unmercifully by not only him and the line cooks, but also the homeless guy who ran the dishwasher in the back. And by that time, JP had also fashioned a light to the front. A LIGHT. I don't know which part I caught more hell for by then - the light, the upturned handlebars, or the fact that I was in high school and still riding a bike to my job.

I am convinced that everyone has one of these things with their parents from when they were kids, one of those unexplainable clashes in taste where the parents inevitably win because until you're out of the house, the only taste that matters - when the purchases are over $50, that is - are the parents' taste.

My friend Sarah left for NYC this week to continue her professional dancing career with a fancypants dance troupe and she wasn't in need of her bike any longer. I bought it from her for $50. It's a sleek, purple road bike with curled handlebars, albeit only one speed. I hugged my friend, wished her well, loaded the bike into JoJo the Wonder Scion and immediately headed straight to Rapid Transit where I had them make one major modification, and one only:

I had them swap out the curled handlebars for upturned ones. It's frickin' sweet, and I'm going to be so happy every morning and night when I'm riding that thing back and forth downtown for work.

Posted by Erin at 04:46 PM | filed under: Random Stupidity