When I Turned Thirty

When I turned thirty I was so depressed! I thought the world had come to an end. All my friends tried to cheer me up and had a party for me. My kids’ dad asked me what I wanted for my birthday. He was not a big present giver so he was really trying to cheer me up. Well, I thought and thought and told him that I wanted a bicycle. Needless to say, that surprised him. I had never had a bicycle of my own and had never had a girl’s bike. I don’t know where he got the bike, but this I do know he paid twenty five dollars for it. This amount of money was huge in those days. Oh, I loved that bike, I rode and rode it. I can still feel the wind blowing through my hair and how free it made me feel. If you remember one of my posts was how much I loved speed.
One day shortly after my birthday, I needed to go to the grocery store. When I got home from riding my bike, I jumped in the car and backed up to make a u-turn. I lived in a small town. Everything was legal in those days. As I backed up I heard the most awful crunching noise. It sounded like metal bones breaking. My new bike!!! I knew that my husband had done odd jobs to be able to buy my new bike, so I went to the neighbor man to see if he could fix it. He was the father of those five children I wrote about, so I am sure he had practice. To make a long story short, he did an excellent job and my husband never noticed it.
Some time later, maybe a few weeks I made sure that I parked my bike in front of the car to make sure that I did not back over it. I did not back over it, I ran over it! This time my husband saw it. He suggested that I park the bike on the porch or the front yard, somebody had snitched on me about the last time I had run over it. He didn’t get mad at me, he just quietly fixed it, put it up on the porch and smiled and said, “ Now keep it away from that car, it just doesn’t like your bike!”

When I was checking the computer for a picture of a mangled bike, I saw hundreds of them. I wonder if these people were all turning thirty?!