I: THE FIRST ONE WE LOVE IS A MYSTERY. It is an inevitable surprise. It is the gift we dream of yet cannot use once we have it—unless first we cripple it with training wheels. We are told, with a certainty anchored by more than two centuries of proof, what we in our wobbling, toppling but unbreakable desire cannot comprehend: that mastering it is one of life’s fundamental skills, a function that once gained will never leave us. We are not told of what else is granted us for life by taking a few pedal strokes along a sidewalk, those lesson that at our age we could neither verbalize nor comprehend yet, of the experience, absorb: how to accept dependence to become independent, how to leave those who make it possible for us to leave, how no adventure is complete until we find our way home. And to not stick our big toes in things that are spinning really fast.

That bike, the first bike of our lives, cannot be bound by either its own tubes or the curbs of our youth. It is emotion and sensation not only incarnate but powered, for once on purpose, by our own bodies. It is abstractions such as freedom, risk, and tenacity wrought into physical form — with cool stickers. Sometimes even a bell.

Such particulars are not to be underestimated.  The color of our first bike — whatever color it is — will for the rest of our lives elicit an indistinct, seemingly rootless pleasure we rarely think to trace back to its source. And at the far stretches of age we will still summon, vivid and lush with portent, the scratch along the top tube, the nameplate askew, the scuffed-off end of the grip, the mechanical rattle of the chain against the chainguard.

Yet for all the strength with which we hold the bike in our minds, we so easily let the real thing slip from us. Who among us has not abandoned our first love? It comes to us as a mystery, that bike, and in absence remains so throughout our lives, and maybe that is why it is the one we never stop longing for.