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The morning ritual around here is pretty easy.  As I wake up and get moving, the second stop is the kitchen.  Most of the time I clean up anything sitting on the counter from last nights dinner and get the coffee brewing so as to re-balance the caffeine/blood mixture coursing through my veins.  Once the coffee is inside my belly, all is right with the world.

Our coffee machine was a very expensive item sitting on the shelf at StarBucks about ten years ago.  It was a beautiful thing with a stainless steel carafe, an automatic timer, and a black shapely exterior.  To say it has earned its keep in our kitchen would be a vast understatement as it has saved this household a LOT of money.  As the maker of superior, rich, dark coffee every morning I would have paid more than the $100 asking price had I known how reliable it would be through the years.  A very good buy!

The machine, known in our house as “The Maker”, has a clock on it too.  But that clock gets used mostly as a timer instead of a clock because it doesn’t stay plugged in.  Do you know about phantom energy?  Leaving something with a clock inside plugged in uses energy you must pay the Electric Company dearly for its use.  Wasteful.  Anyway, for those of us who are challenged by the count of time a clock provides a morning race occurs with every brewing of the grounds.  Here is how it goes: when The Maker is plugged into the wall, the 60 count begins, and my frantic grab is for the Brita water pitcher.  A stream of H2o magically funnels into the top of the water reservoir at a very high flow rate.  That complete, it is over to the freezer to apprehend the container which keeps the coffee in a constant state of ready.  Rip its’ top off, then a quick swipe into the silverware drawer where I will grab a tablespoon to measure out the scientifically perfect amount of coffee into the metal-screened filter.  Then, I am back at The Maker scooping 8 kinda-sorta heaping spoonfuls in.  A push of the ON button and the race is over.  If the clock still reads 12:01, I am Winner, and still Champion of the kitchen!  Otherwise, I hang my head and await further instructions.

This morning as I celebrated the first victory of the morning, I was watching the clock tick off the number 12:07, kinda spaced for a minute or five, and there it was, the memory of my first bike.

I think I was 8 years old.  At that time I stood about four foot something, just like all the other kids in the neighborhood growing up.  In my family I was right plum stuck in the middle of five children.  YES, Mom and Dad were super busy!  And NO, we are not Catholic.  Anyway, with two older siblings and two younger, it was a great childhood for a kid named Dave.  My family went like this: boy, girl, ME, girl, boy.  My older brother is 3 years older, and my older sister 2.  The younger sister is two years my junior, and the youngest is 10 years less than me, so he wasn’t there for My First Bike.

And getting back to the story, my first bike wasn’t even mine; it was my older sisters!  She had just received it from Dad and Mom for her birthday (I’m guessing) and it was sitting in its usual parking space on the front porch.  We lived in this great house (only when I got older did I realize the house wasn’t all that big until Dad put his carpenter’s apron on and learned how to construct a house after he came home from work each day) on almost an acre of lawn in a neighborhood zoned for residential/farm.  The houses were (still are) spaced nicely apart and all had big trees.  Some of our neighbors had horses, pigs, sheep, and chickens….lots of chickens…..so there was always something to do, some adventure to have, or just a fun place to get older!  And the front porch was the place for anything important.  As a kid growing up McClellan wanting to keep track of your stuff, you left it where you could see it.  That place was the front porch.  Until Dad came home, then everything went in back.

So my older sister left her new bike on the front porch.  And her watchful eyes maintained a very liberal “safety zone” around it.  She would magically appear, as if out of thin air, if you were too close.  And so it went.

And I told you I was like, 4 foot sumthin’ right?  That bike was super tall and I don’t recall if my head even made it to the handlebars!  As I am standing there on the front porch – this is just before my eyes rolled back in my head and a demon possession occurred – just outside the “safety zone”, taking in all the colors the shiny blue paint was reflecting into my eyes, and I really don’t remember how I came to get on the bike and go for a ride.  But I remember riding that bike down the street with my sister running after me.  I was laughing maniacally with my head spinning around trying to see which side she would attack from next, and I was veering from side of the road to side of the road, and all the neighbors were probably wondering when I would fall.

I didn’t fall that day.  That would be much later.

My first bike.  And it wasn’t even mine!

Good times.