When a bike basket was oh so humiliating

In the hall of fame of life’s hardearned lessons, there’s an entire wing devoted to getting a bad birthday present.

You can learn a lot from getting a bad birthday present. Unfortunately, you might not understand the lesson until four decades later.

I think I was about 12 when I got the oddest, most unexpected and least wanted birthday present of my life. It was a basket for my bicycle.

My bike was the most important thing I owned. It was a cool banana-seat bike but there was really nothing special about it. It was used when I got it and had parts missing. It was supposed to have handbrakes, but didn’t.

I learned to slow down by placing my shoe on the tire at the point where it went through the front forks. Worked beautifully. I don’t know whether my parents were unaware of this safety defect or if they knew about it and didn’t care because they had lots of other kids and one less mouth to feed wouldn’t be a bad thing overall.

My bike came with an extrahigh sissy bar which I hated and soon converted to a short one. I didn’t like the term sissy. Anything with sissy in the name made me distinctly uncomfortable.

But to have a bike was to have wings. It was the key to freedom, your only means of defying the surly bonds of earth. You had to respect a thing that had such power. How could you defile it with a basket? That was like converting a Corvette Stingray into a dump truck.

A basket wasn’t just not cool. It was a girl thing. The thought of having a girl thing on your bike was as humiliating as showing up for class in a dress. How could they not understand this?

Clearly, they didn’t know me. That’s the real sting of getting a bad present — proof that your entire personality is a mystery to the giver. That feeling of being unknown was a deep, empty chasm.

I was not grateful, but I had no choice but to accept the gift, if only to ensure I would receive gifts in the future.

I even allowed the detestable accessory to be affixed to my poor, unsuspecting bicycle.

I was the youngest in the family, which made me the gopher — as in ‘go to the store for this, go to the store for that.’ On a bike, you had to use some ingenuity to get a paper grocery bag home from the store. You had to wrap the first few inches around the hand grip and ride like that. If the bag was heavy, it might start to swing like a pendulum, the bike overreacting to the slightest steering input, forcing you to veer violently off course.

Alternatively, you could take everything out of the bag and stuff it down your T-shirt. It worked fine as long as your shirt was tucked in, though you looked like a lumpily stuffed child Santa.

But I couldn’t use a basket, no. That would threaten my dignity. But then I tried it. I could steer. I could ride home from the store faster than I ever had before. Practicality had instantly trumped style. Baskets were great. Yeah, still a bit girlie, but at least mine was manly wire mesh and not woven plastic.

So maybe I was understood. Maybe they knew that a bike basket would make my life easier. Maybe they did care.

And maybe that’s why I drive a squaresville four-door sedan today. With the rear seats folded down, I can carry eight-foot two-by-fours with the trunk closed. That’s cool on a whole other level.

Am I kidding myself? Let’s just say I’ve got enough rationalizations to fill a basket.