I was walking past a local bicycle store the other day when a big, bright green nostalgia machine winked at me. It was a bicycle, a huge one with cream trim, built in a style I hadn't seen since I was a preteen. It was tucked in among the heavy-duty BMX models, the pricey, Italian 16-speed racers and the high-tech mountain bikes making up the bulk of the window display. But the green bike was what caught my eye.
I walked inside and asked the proprietor whether the bike was for sale or whether it belonged to someone who worked at the store."Nah, we sell 'em," the man said with a little laugh. He was my age or thereabouts, and just starting to go gray. They did not sell many like it in his shop, only as the occasional gift item or to someone trying to relive some moment from the past.
"I had one of these once," I admitted, a trifle sheepishly.
"Me too," the man said with a smile, and a bond was instantly formed.
"I had the big Schwinn," I said.
"Looked just like a motorcycle," he added.
"Yeah, it did," I told him.
"Mine too," he said. "Did you turn your handlebars up in the air like a big chopper?"
"Yup," I answered with the silliest kind of pride - I could now own up to it. "My dad really ripped me for that," I said, and he laughed.
"Take the fenders off?" he asked.
"No, I didn't," I said. But I knew what he was getting at. Some kids, him too perhaps, took the silver fenders off their Schwinns to make them look tough, like a Hell's Angels motorcycle. You remember Marlon Brando in "The Wild One"? That was the look.
"I was the other kind of kid," I said. "I dressed it like a Hot Rod Harley, you know? Streamers and 'coon tails and a mudflap with Yosemite Sam on it."
He laughed again. His name was Leigh. We recognized each other as members of the brotherhood of the "big bike." We rattled off the names of the great cruisers of our youth: Rollfast, Western Flyer, Columbia. (The big green bike in the window was a Columbia.)
I told Leigh how my friends and I used to pretend we were a motorcycle gang, jumping curbs, leaving long skid marks on the sidewalk. He laughed and led me through a brief history of how bicycle design has tended to mimic motorcycle design, how the first "big bikes" had wide handlebars like the Harleys. Even the ever-popular BMXs (which evolved from those little "banana seat" bikes of the '60s called Sting-Rays) were meant to look like off-road motorbikes, he claimed.
I nodded and told him about my son, Ivan, and his friends racing through the park on their BMXs, pretending to be motorcycle racers. "That's what kids do," he said and grinned.
"But it wasn't only motorcycles we pretended about," I recalled. "We also pretended the bikes were horses."
"Really?" He cocked his head.
"There was a Kentucky Derby once, when we were really little," I said. "The horse that won was named Tim Tam. We saw it on TV, and for the rest of the spring all we did was rerun that race around the block. Each of us would be one of the horses from the Derby. Tim Tam, Jewel's Reward, Silky Sullivan - I still remember the names."
My kids' bike dreams went beyond horses and motorcycles. I recalled that in the latter days of the "Star Wars" trilogy, Ivan and his posse began calling themselves the 97th Street Imperial Star Lords. And my daughter, Dani, spent one summer telling anyone who'd listen that her bicycle was a flying dragon, patting the thing on the "nose" and calling it something that sounded like Shameera.
Leigh laughed and then told me how, in the late 1950s, the big bikes began being squeezed out of the American market by the thin-tired, lightweight English racers, usually three-speeds with handlebar brakes.
"That's right!" I said, for my Derby summer was indeed the last hurrah for the big bikes.
And we turned those racer bikes into horses, too, for a kind of polo game we invented. We played on asphalt, kicking around a gym ball as we cycled back and forth at high speeds, smacking into one another now and again.
But then one day we saw a movie about the six-day bike races they had in the '30s. For weeks after, we staged our own six-day bike races around the neighborhood, all-day races in teams of two or three or four, just like we'd seen on the big screen. Fifty laps, 100 laps, 200 laps. One weekend we ran a 1,000-lap race! Morning till dusk. All weekend! The magnificent quads I carry to this very day I owe to that weekend of bicycle madness when we pretended to be the courageous bike racers of the Great Depression.
Bicycles are great. They're good for your body. They're good for the environment. They get you out in the open air with your kids. But for me, the best thing about bicycles is that they are dream machines.
And what's wrong with racing around on motorcycles, or riding a dragon across the sky, or even winning the Kentucky Derby every once in a while?