I wanted to ride as much of that sunny spring Friday as I could, so that morning I’d logged in for eight hours of holiday time; and that’s how it was that a little before noon, I’d already looped back into town after about three hours out and stopped at t

There were other people there from other rides, mostly people I knew, sitting like me at one of the two rickety wood-slat tables on the sidewalk, or on the concrete steps leading down to the shop door or leaning on the railing, and we had all decided to go back out together on a favourite route once some of them finished eating. A mother and daughter walked in among us, holding hands, both of them in white summer dresses, the girl maybe six or seven and the mother somewhere in her thirties. The girl was skipping the way kids skip not when they’re trying keep up, but when they’re expressing something that adults have mostly forgotten about the act of going from one place to another.

The mother and daughter walked down into the shop, and as I turned from idly watching them – most likely to say something really important to someone about the ride we were about to do, like which hills we might take when we had choices – I saw across the street, on the opposite corner, three women all about the age of the mother, all in black dresses. They were walking almost without lifting their feet, and they were leaning against each other, arms through arms, heads tipped together, and as I watched they stopped and turned into each other in a little circle and bent into each other; and that was when I realised they must have come down from the porch of the funeral home over there. I noticed then the cars lining the kerb, waiting, magnetic orange funeral procession flags on the bonnets.

We were putting our things on, our caps and our gloves and our sunglasses and our helmets, when the mother and the daughter came back out. Taylor carried the girl’s new bike up the stairs and set it on the sidewalk and the girl reached out and held each grip of the handlebar, which had pink and white and blue streamers, and the mother and Taylor started talking about maintenance and other stuff you need to know when you get a new bike. As I listened, I came to understand that the girl had learned to ride on her brother’s bike; and as a reward, they’d bought this one a few days earlier, and it was all sized up and tuned now, and they were supposed to come past over the weekend to take it home but the little girl had been driving the mother absolutely crazy about getting her new bike, couldn’t wait to ride it, and so, here they were.

While all this was happening, the girl kept swinging the bar to make the streamers flutter, then looking up at her mother, and she had on a new pink helmet with flowers or animals or something on it, and she was wrinkling her nose and making the streamers dance, and she was everything innocent and beautiful about bicycles and riding them and wanting to ride them. The people I was supposed to head out with were on their bikes, some already clicking in, and I didn’t want to miss the ride, so I got my bike and got on it and got into my pedals and set off with them. I looked back on our way out of town. I looked back twice, one more time than I should have, and I crossed wheels with the rider in front of me but stayed up. A couple of people made fun of me.

I never did get to see the girl take the first pedal stroke of the first ride of the first new bike of her life that was all her own. The funeral procession had started up, though. ▶or a while there, I thought it might catch us.

On the ride, I got away with the two strongest riders over the most awful uphill grind, and we were working together so well that none of us sprinted for the town sign on the long runout after the downhill. It meant I was one of them. That kind of thing mattered a lot to me back then, probably more than it should have, but on that day I almost didn’t care at all. I kept going back over and over to the girl and her bike, and how our group had outridden the mourning procession, at least for that day anyway, and more than 10 years later I still think about it all, about how when we decide we deserve a new bike we shouldn’t wait one second longer than we have to to get on it.