All I could think about was a pastel pink and lavender ten-speed bike.
My age was still in single digits, but my height shot up unexpectedly, making me the tallest in my class. I had learned to ride a bicycle on a tiny kid model which bruised up my knees when I tried to use it with my suddenly longer legs. I spent every day sharing a rugged hand-me-down BMX bike with a sibling or begging the older neighborhood girls for a turn on their glorious big bikes, gifts from the most recent Christmas and Hanukkah, different shades of in a rainbow sherbet palette. I was desperate to add one more hue to their number, and the Sears Catalog had just the object of my dreams, ready and waiting to be mine.
Modern television and film, as well as recent Eighties fancy dress parties will tell you the 1980’s were filled solely with neon and florescent colors, singeing our retinas with their loudness. But there was another color story being told, one that came into play when the manufactured dirty earth tones of avocado, copper brown, and mustard yellow faded from popularity. It was the softer, gentler shades of Sanrio’s Little Twin Stars that filled the pages of the latest Sears and JC Penney Catalogs and my childhood heart. Think soft, matte pinks and lavenders, minty green, yellow but not too bright, dove grey, and lots of sky blue. I was a super girly girl and in my mind these were super girly colors, ones I wanted to wrap myself in.
I am a member of that blessedly oft-forgotten group of humans known as Gen X. The term latchkey kid came into use to describe my peers and I, a generation whose collective identity was shaped in part by very hands-off parenting in households with a single parent or where both parents worked full time out of the house. Latchkey, because we had our own house keys we’d use to let ourselves into our homes where no one was waiting for us after school to give us snacks or tell us to sit down and do homework. It gave us, for better or for worse, an independent streak that the generations before and after can’t claim to the same degree. Statistically, as many as 40% of us were left with a deep deficit of parental supervision, with lots of our own care falling on ourselves to provide.
My experience wasn’t consistent and didn’t follow the gender norms of the day. In my early childhood it was more likely my Dad who would be home, not my Mom. She worked during the day and often weekends, while my Dad worked a graveyard shift in the evening. His days were filled with going to school for a later-in-life advanced degree after taking an early medical retirement from the Los Angeles Police Department.
Summer was a long stretch of time I was expected to fill without interference.
If a parent was home, they would shoo me out of the house in the morning, expecting me to come back solely for lunch, bathroom breaks, and dinner, when we were summoned by my Mom’s loud and distinct whistle, heard from blocks away. There was a long season when I’d be booted from the house to occupy myself while everyone was gone. Our next door neighbor was a Taiwanese lady who’d married an Italian-American soldier. My Mom would pay Mrs. Pavesi to provide a hot, homemade lunch but not to supervise. We could use her bathroom, but we could not lounge in her home longer than it took to eat the dumplings or noodles she’d make for us.
There were so many things to fill my day. A scoop of cylindrical ice cream at the Thrifty’s up the street was just a dime, so I could spend hours walking up and down sidewalks and hitting all the pay phones looking for dropped coins. I have always been a fast reader, so I’d often climb up the tree in our front yard and go through a chapter book a day. A natural stream was just a few blocks away, one that ran through the whole town, and it was filled with tadpoles and frogs and other tiny wildlife worthy of careful exploration. A fire station at the end of the street was always worth strolling by, to see the big hoses being carefully coiled and maybe catch the giant two-driver hook-and-ladder truck going out or returning from a call.
My favorite way to spend the day was in the water. We were the only house on the block without a swimming pool, and I was the cheeky child who would don a swimsuit, hang a towel around my shoulders and boldly knock on a different neighbor’s door each morning before they left for work. In a confident voice I’d ask if I could please swim in their pool for the day, assuring them my mom said it was okay. Most of the neighbors had adult kids who had already flown the coop, so my charming and eager little face easily wooed them into letting their dormant pools get some enjoyment. I can’t remember ever once being turned down. I also can’t imagine that ever happening today, allowing a child to swim unattended in your backyard while you’re off at work for the day! It was a different era for sure.
We were allowed to go pretty far on our own, but the city public library was generally a trip saved for when the parents could take us. It was just under three miles from my front door and the journey crossed the busiest street in town. On foot it took an hour each way, and I always checked out the maximum number of books allowed. My Mom was a huge proponent of self-reliance, so there was no question that I would be expected to carry anything I checked out. A bike would give me wheels and wings to further freedom. If I had a bike, I could get there and back a lot more quickly and a case could be made for going on my own.
I’d folded the pages of the Sears and JC Penney Catalogs featuring the pink and lavender 10-speed bikes which inhabited my daydreams, longing to match the ram’s horn shaped handlebars of the teenage girls’ bicycles in my neighborhood. A bicycle represented a new level of freedom, one that even with the ridiculous amount of leeway I enjoyed I didn’t yet have. I’d sit on the curb, flooded with envy watching the sisters from across the street head off midmorning to somewhere amazing I could not follow on foot, not even if I ran alongside them.
I started a campaign to win my parents over. I’d taken to being more responsible, carrying groceries, setting the table, all without being asked. Not one for subtlety, I made sure all my acts of service were highly visible. I was certain my Mom and Dad were spending each evening in private conversation about my obvious bike worthiness, so I stopped complaining about my early bedtime so their last daily interaction with me was always a pleasant one.
As the early days of summer stretched into weeks, I upped my campaign, leaving notes and handmade cards complimenting my parents on their wisdom and reminding them of all the ways having a bike would make my life easier, which in turn would make theirs easier as well. I filled pads of paper with bicycle drawings, colored in my dream shades of pink and lavender. When nothing happened, I decided the only hold up must be the question of how to get the bike from the store to our garage, so I circled the delivery options from Sears, helpfully leaving the catalog open to the requisite page, casually bringing up at every opportunity how great it was that you could just order something from a catalog and like magic it arrives at your home!
In reality our family financial situation was shaky, far more than my parents would ever let on.
My Dad had received an honorable medical retirement for a temporary disability, but it meant the end of his dream career in law enforcement, one he held as an MP in Korea and then coming back to America to join the LAPD. It was all he’d ever wanted to do, and to give it up, along with the steady income, prestige, and security it brought could not have been easy. After that premature retirement he worked on an advanced degree in a different field, but it turned out to be a field he could never actually advance in.
The job he worked overnight was physical, one he took for the hours, not to brag about. It kept us away from total disaster while my Mom’s salary kept the house and car away from the bank. I imagine it was beyond difficult for my Dad, raised by a hardworking father who steadfastly supported a wife, a son, and two daughters without complaint.
That particular summer we had no way of knowing we were just a few years away from affluence. My Dad would later fall into a career in the film industry, one that fit his extroverted and outgoing personality so perfectly you could make a case that he never “worked” another day in his life. All that was still in the future though.
At the moment I was wearing my older cousins’ cast off clothing, not because they were cute — which they were, but because my continual growth was happening faster than my parents’ ability to clothe me in appropriate sizes. I had no understanding of the economy or levels of poverty. I had something delicious to eat at every meal, a roof over my head and a bedroom of my own, clean clothes to wear and shoes that fit. It is to my Mom and Dad’s eternal credit that there was never a single moment I ever believed we were actually poor.
Maybe if I’d known the truth about our temporary financial situation, I would not have been so relentless in begging and pleading for the object of my dreams. Unfortunately for my parents, my desire for the one thing I did not have only grew, my crusade to get them to bend to my will simply increased.
The long 4th of July weekend was the perfect time to have the neighborhood girls join me in pleading with my parents. The family across the street had a big BBQ and all day long my friends helped by lobbing shameless statements into the grown-ups’ conversation on my behalf, like if Heather just had a bike, she could come with us to the library and you wouldn’t have to drive her, or there’s this really cool park filled with ducks we want to show Heather, but we can’t take her because she doesn’t have a bike.
So certain this tactic would be the one to finally bring me the glorious object of my affections, I actually dialed back my intensity in the days that followed. I took to practicing my “surprised face” in the hallway mirror in preparation for its imminent arrival and shifted my nightly bedtime prayers from asking for a bicycle to thanking God for the bike which was already on the way. I was confident and ready.
One late Saturday afternoon in August, my Dad came home and called out for me. “Heather! Let’s go get your bike!” I dropped what I was doing and flew to him with a song in my heart and wings on my feet. Where is it, I sang, looking past him into the driveway. “Close,” he told me. “You get to come with me to pick it up!”
Early that morning he’d driven past a house preparing for a garage sale. Never one to pass up an interesting treasure to be found for a bargain, he slowed to look out the window, and then came to a complete stop when he saw the family setting out a bike. He jumped out of the car and paid them on the spot, asking them to keep it until the afternoon when he could come back with his daughter to collect it. It was several blocks from our house, and I didn’t walk so much as dance in circles around my Dad on the way over, speaking rapidly until I ran out of breath.
Could I name it? Do bikes have names? Thank you Dad, thank you! Oh my gosh I can’t believe this! Can I ride it back? Can you keep up if I ride really fast? I can’t wait to show everyone! I’m so excited! Is this really happening? This is the best day of my life!
We arrived at the house, all evidence of the garage sale put away. I did cartwheels on the lush lawn, bursting with happiness while my Dad rang the doorbell. An elderly man greeted us and then walked us to the garage and unlocked it. Together he and my Dad raised the heavy wooden door which would reveal my long awaited dream come true.
My heart pounded as I looked around, seeing no evidence of a bike in the dark, cramped space. “Look Heather! Here it is!” My Dad’s energy matched my own fever pitch of excitement. I followed his pointed finger toward something so ugly I involuntarily shuddered with disgust despite the sweltering heat.
It was green. Not a soft, minty green. It was the exact shade of vomit our Dalmatian would puke up after eating too much grass. The color of the nasty, smelly slime in the gutter after the rain. Of little brother boogers left on the windowsill. The perfect hue of heart-rending disappointment when a cruel joke has been played on a tender girl.
It was a 1970’s Schwinn, complete with a hideous green glitter banana seat and long plastic strips the color of snot falling from each wide, straight handlebar. It was a relic, a dinosaur, older than me and used by some other child who’d discarded it after they got a better bike. It was cruel laughter from mean older kids, turned into a tangible metal object I was expected to love. It came complete with a mini-replica of a green Idaho state license plate attached to the back, with the word SPUD engraved on it.
It might as well have said DUD.
The sky-high excitement I’d felt moments before plummeted back to planet Earth so hard it formed a crater of despair around me. I turned in speechless disbelief toward my Dad, this man who had allowed me to believe he was taking me to retrieve the much-longed-for bicycle of my dreams. Every part of me was rejecting what was on offer.
My vision blurred in volcanic rage, shame filling me for allowing my hopes to soar so high, only to be made a fool. My fingernails dug into my palms as my hands curled into fists. I wanted to scream angry words of hurt but I paused for my brain to catch up, to think of the most hurtful combination of horrible things to say to inflict damage on the person who’d perpetuated this savage act.
The pause was fortuitous, as it gave my oblivious father an opening to lean over, brush his hand along the garishly glittered banana seat, and start singing its praises. “I know it’s not exactly like the one from the catalog. We really wanted to get it for you, we were trying to figure out how to make it happen. And then I drove past this house today and saw this beautiful shade of green that took my breath away. I knew it was just the right bike for you, really so much better than the other one. I put money down to make sure no one else got it first. Can you believe it was just waiting for you? For months we’ve been driving past this house, not even knowing it was here! I can’t believe how lucky we are I saw it! Isn’t it perfect, Heather! What do you think?”
He looked at me, his eyes full of sparkle, his face beaming with love, his words filled with the purest of admiration for the heap of ugliness before me. This wasn’t a joke, this wasn’t a trick, this was a thoughtful gift, an act of generous benevolence from a father to his beloved daughter.
My anger and shame still burned, but I relaxed my clenched fists, just a little. I couldn’t make eye contact with my Dad who was radiating hope, so I looked again at the bike, a realization dawning that I held the power to transfer all my hurt directly to my Dad. I could tell him I hated it. I could tell him I hated him. I could tell him if he loved it so much he could ride the hideous thing. I could stomp my foot, turn up my nose, and dramatically reject it as I walked away… I knew the way home. I could let him be filled with pain and shame and embarrassment in front of the old stranger who still stood there, watching this exchange roll out.
Words have power, and I knew how to use them.
The resolve to launch my hurt at him short circuited, just for a second. I was a daddy’s girl. This was my Dad. The man who had driven by a garage sale, saw a bike, knew the desire of my heart, and with a million other things going through his mind, thought of me.
I could feel the desire to cause pain draining from my body. The shame of disappointment was replaced with deep embarrassment over my nasty selfishness, echoes of which I can still feel as I type this. The anger dissipated and my heart felt gratitude — not for the bike itself, but for whatever stopped me from actually saying aloud awful words which might have deeply damaged the cherished relationship I enjoyed with my Dad.
I knew what I had to do, but I couldn’t bring myself to even fake a smile. Except for the now unclenched fists, I couldn’t change my frozen body language. So I paused one more moment, squinted my eyes shut, took a breath and silently chanted green is my favorite color, green is my favorite color, green is my favorite color.
I exhaled and opened my eyes. And I saw my new green bike, the color of the stunning swirls of algae growing on my favorite climbing boulders in the spring behind our house. The same shade as the naughty crocodile in Peter Pan, my most-watched Disney film. Green, the color of the pine needles in my front yard climbing tree where I loved to hang out with a book. The exact pigment of the dollar bills my father had somehow scraped together to provide such abundance for his little girl. The perfect hue to capture the tangible sacrifice of a man who would do anything for his family, including working all night and studying all day to invest in a future he didn’t yet see.
I looked at my dad and sheepishly thanked him, leaning in for a hug. He squeezed me so tight with so much joy a genuine smile finally spread across my face. I rode my new green bike home slowly while he walked beside me. My long legs didn’t bang into the handlebars and he talked about attaching a basket so I could fill it with library books, and yes, I could ride it to the library by myself, first thing on Monday. I wasn’t wrong about the cruel kids in the neighborhood, they mocked it and the stupid SPUD license plate, but it was mine, all mine… Freedom on two wheels, a level up in independence, and a valuable lesson that dreams will often come true if you pay attention, but they will rarely match what we conjure up in our imaginations. Sometimes they’ll be even better.
A few years later when our financial situation changed dramatically, I found a giant beast of a gift wrapped in tissue paper next to the Christmas tree with my name on it. It was a pink and lavender ten-speed, a major upgrade to the old green jalopy which was rapidly wearing out from miles and miles of enthusiastic daily use and abuse. It was peak luxury to have my first ever brand new bike, even if it happened at the advanced age of twelve. I was very grateful, riding it all over until I turned sixteen and abandoned it for my first car — a powder blue 1964 Ford Falcon, even older than that 1970’s Schwinn bicycle.
But it was a genuine surprise to me, finally receiving what I’d previously begged for, only to find those delicate shades of pink and lavender were someone else’s colors, not mine.
My color will always be green, the color of love.
Happy Father’s Day, Daddy. Thank you for always using your words to build up instead of tearing down, for patiently teaching me what love looks like, over and over again, and for that amazing green bike you barely remember but I’ll never forget. I wish I still had it today, it would be worth a small fortune. I love you like… well, like the color green. A truly immeasurable amount that stretches to infinity and beyond.