Matthew Monday: A Christmas Bicycle, an Adventure, and Red Sneakers

We had a lovely Christmas this past week.  We gave Matthew a bicycle for Christmas.  He wanted one so bad he was willing to use his money to chip in.  But he didn’t have to pay.  We bought it outright for him.  Today we took it out of the box to assemble it.  The instructions say it’s 95% assembled.  You just have 5% to finish it off.  Yeah right.

You had to assemble the handlebars, the seat, the front wheel, and the pedals.  The handlebars were first up in the assembly.  Looked simple enough.  I watched the YouTube video on assembling it.  Seemed easy.  So the handlebars were attached to the break and gear shift cables, so you had to twist it into position to clamp it in, but you had to make sure the various cables weren’t twisted around the various tubes of the frame.  OK, so I screwed it in and now onto the seat…wait a minute.  The front brake cable is twisted around the front upright part of the frame.  So unclamp it and try it again…wait…the handlebars are backwards.  The brake levers are on the outside of the handlebars, not the inside.  Let’s try it again…wait…the brake levers are upside down.  Unscrew it again and screw it back…wait…the cables are twisted again.  No!  You b#**^%$.  After two hours of twisting and turning the handlebars, screwing it in and unscrewing it out umpteen times, my wife says why don’t you take it to a bike repair place?

Sigh.  I didn’t want to do that.  I called a local one up and they said it would be fifty bucks.  I looked at the bike parts and figured it was worth it.

So Matthew and I got the bike parts in the back seat of the car and took it to Bennett’s Bike Shop, who claim to have been repairing bikes on Staten Island for 125 years!  That’s back to 1896.  Check out this article.  I brought the bike parts in and an old guy who might have been there 125 years ago came out to greet me.  He kind of looked like the Mickey character (Burgess Meredith) from the Rocky films.  He said he probably wouldn’t have been able to assemble it himself working from home.  He said it would take an hour and it would be $50 plus tax.  OK, that’s great.  I’ll wait.  And he said no, there was no place for us to hang around and to come back in an hour.  He kind of forced us out.

 

So I was low on gas anyway, and we went out to get gas.  I asked Matthew why he thought Mickey did not want us in the store waiting?  He shrugged his shoulders.  Because Mickey can probably put the entire bike together in ten minutes and still wanted to charge us for an hour’s work.  Did you think he could not put the bike together at home like he said?  Of course he could.

So an hour later we got back and there was the bike waiting for us all assembled, tires inflated and ready to go!  And the handlebars were perfectly assembled, no twisted cables, and the brakes worked perfectly.  Old Mickey had done a great job. 

So we take the bike to the car and try to put it in the back seat, and now fully assembled it will not fit.  So I turn to Matthew and tell him he will have to ride the bike home.  Now Matthew until then had only ridden around the block and hardly ever in the streets.  We’re over two miles from home, all city streets, and it’s almost completely uphill from the bike shop to our house.  I asked him if he thought he could do it, and he confidently said he could.  So we did.  I tried to stay close with the car but I couldn’t hold up traffic, so I had to go ahead and backtrack many times.  Here are a couple of pictures of Matthew biking home.

 

 

It was kind of cold.  All he had on was his hoodie sweatshirt.  But he made it.  It was his adventure!  A good half hour later and we were home.

 

So what about the red sneakers?  Well, this was the first year Matthew used his own money to buy mommy and daddy Christmas presents.  He bought his mother a wonderfully personalized tee-shirt that read “World’s Greatest Mom—Matthew Says So.”  He bought his dad red converse sneakers.  Red sneakers???  “Why would I wear red sneakers?”  Matthew says I needed to look more stylish.  “You’re too boring Dad.”  Well how do you like that?  Here’s a picture of my red sneakers.

 

Now that I’ve been wearing them, Matthew says they kind of look like clown sneakers.  *Face-Palm*  First they’re stylish.  Now they’re clown sneakers. It’s a good thing I love him.