Ruby for Women, August, 2011

Hurry Up, Slowpoke!

by Nina Newton When I was a little girl, riding my bike was one of the endless activities that filled my summer days. We lived by a lake, and our road was a dead-end, so most of the cars that drove by our house were either people who lived there or perhaps strangers who were lost. In any event, hardly anyone ever drove down that road fast . . . because there was a huge tree at the end of the road and you had to drive around that tree to turn around and go right back out the way you came in.

The other really great thing about “Our Road” was that there was a little hill just beyond our house (it seemed quite enormous to me at the time!) We would race down that hill to the bottom, and come screaming to a stop just before we would crash into an enormous Weeping Willow tree at the edge of a swampy area. Now THAT was a great way to spend a summer afternoon!

One day I was racing my bike with my BFF, and as we came zooming down that hill with the summer breeze whipping our hair into our eyes, we were laughing and yelling at one another to “Go faster! Go faster!.”

Suddenly I looked over and saw that she was RIGHT THERE and we slammed into each other. Of course, that knocked us both off of our bikes, right there in the middle of “Our Road,” and there was blood everywhere. We both had skinned up our knees and our hands, knocked heads somewhere along the way, and we probably both had a fat lip. Fortunately, nothing was broken except our momentary dreams of being world-class bike racers, but it did put us out of commission for a few days. Not long, though!

Soon we were both back to the business of all the adventures that little girls would have on a summer day, playing in the woods, spying on the other neighborhood kids through the branches of that Weeping Willow tree, and racing our bikes down the hill again right there on “Our Road.”

That’s the way life usually presents itself to us, both as children and as adults. One minute we are flying down the road of Life with our hair flying in the breeze, laughing as we go. And then, suddenly, we are confronted with “The Hill” of adversity, and frequently we crash and burn before we get back up and travel on.

So what happens when we have to “slow down” for someone else along the way? Sometimes my girls go for a bike ride here on “Our Road” by our house that is also near a lake with a woods in our backyard. But one of our girls can’t go as fast as the other, because she has Cerebral Palsy. It is easy for her sister to get exasperated when they can’t zoom down the road as fast as she would like . . . . so here’s what we do: “How about you go as fast as you can until you get to the sign at the curve, and then come zooming back to catch up with your sister?” That way we all get to go for a bike ride, together, while one gets to experience the thrill of the wind-whipped hair in the eyes and mouth, while the other one gets the opportunity to learn how to make the bike pedals go around and not tip over, all at the same time!

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