Ok, good parent moment. Not on my part though. This one (surprisingly) (wait, I shouldn't say that - I guarantee a punch for that) goes to Kathryn. In a nutshell, Emily can ride a bike now - all thanks to some technique and a lot of patience that Kathryn dug up from somewhere. I know what you're thinking - Kathryn actually had patience for Emily?
But I digress...
This post isn't really about that parenting moment - that's just preamble. For those who don't know, we live in a cul-de-sac. Which is great, since we have this nice keyhole loop where the kids can ride their bikes starting at the corner, past our house, around the bend, past the house on the other side of the street, and then end up at the alley. Then, they stop, turn their bikes around and ride back. They do this because we forbid them to cross the road because we are either:
A) Good parents who don't want their kids to get run-over or;
B) Paranoid, over-protective crazies.
Now, I could digress more here and talk about the stupid kids who insist on playing ball hockey in the busy part of the road, when there's a barely used section of road 10 FEET AWAY! And who don't move their nets or their bodies when a car approaches. (Come on - don't kids know anything about proper street hockey these days?). But I will not, because that would end up with me smashing the computer.
What I will talk about is differences between what I did as a kid and what I let Emily do.
For starters, and this should be apparent to anybody over, oh, let's say 20? We never used to wear bike helmets. It was just run out the back door, grab your bike and off you go. Nowadays it's a long process of getting the helmets down from the closet, adjusting their hair to fit the helmet on their heads. Adjusting the straps to fit the children who have inherited my big head syndrome and then finally forcing them out the door because they've changed their minds about wanting to ride bikes after all. I'm not saying that our childhood was better, cause let me tell you - blunt force trauma to the head ain't that nostalgic.
What I wonder more about is that I can remember taking my bike and actually leaving my parents' sight-line for the whole afternoon. We would ride ON THE STREET!, or even worse, IN THE ALLEY. In fact, my friends John, Anthony and I used to ride in circles up and down one alley driveway, across the alley, up another driveway, and then down this wicked little slope that for some reason was built in to the edge of the driveway. You could get your bike up to about Mach 0.5 for a brief second before (and this was the smart part) shooting out into the alley from a hidden position right beside the garage. I can see now why the owner of said driveway got mad at us for riding our bikes there.
The other main activity with our bikes was riding to the store to buy copious amounts of candy. There were two places you could go in my neighbourhood for your sugar fixes. The first was Sprague Drugs at Petrolia Mall. This was the officially sanctioned place. And by sanctioned, I mean that this is the place that my mom said was ok to go to. Sure, you did have to cross the busy street (40th Ave) - but there were medical professionals there at the store to watch out for us.
The place that we usually went, however, was the little convenience store in the tower at Lord Byron. For some reason, my mom HATE HATE HATED it that we went there. First off, we would normally take a side trip through a ravine. And then there was Lord Byron. I guess it was my mom's middle-class snobbery that assumed people living there were all child molesters? I don't know - sincere apologies if you lived in Lord Byron in the early 80's.
The store there had the most amazing selection of candy ever. There were the usual things like blue fish, cinnamon lips, etc... but then there was weird and crazy crap that you have never seen anywhere else and I have never seen again. I remember one thing that was this little foil-topped plastic rectangle that came with a little plastic spoon. Inside the foil was basically Nutella - but two different colours. That stuff was effing amazing.
The store there didn't just have awesome candy, it also had an arcade game. The one I can remember playing the most was this super-awesome cowboy game where you fought people on top of a moving train. Yeah, that's right mofos - a MOVING EFFING TRAIN! I used to think it was the pinnacle of arcade games. Then I Googled it (arcade game western train) - and found out it was this:
Which is pretty lame.
As I was reminiscing about this - I wondered about where I got the money for my candy-fueled train-punching escapades. I had absolutely no idea, other than pennies found on the ground. We didn't get regular allowances.
As I got older, we graduated to playing video games in the basement on my Nintendo, or my friend Craig's Sega. (note to reader - we're talking 8-bit here - the original Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Master System). We did not, however, graduate from our need for candy. By this time, a new 7-11 (pronounced Sev) clone had opened up at Petrolia Mall - which must have made both my mom and me happy, since it probably had the best candy selection AND it was away from pedo-bear.
As a huge plus - it also had Slurpees.
The one Slurpee story that I do remember is getting to the Sev on our bikes, selecting our candy and getting our Slurpees. Usually, the candy selection took a while - it was a delicate balancing act of what you really wanted vs. what you could actually afford. It was an awesome lesson in economics. The candy purchase usually ended up in a plastic bag that you could hang from your handlebars. The Slurpee was usually held in one hand, so you could drink whilst riding home.
This one time - the candy selection took so long that the weather completely changed from mostly fine: shorts, t-shirts, etc. to not-at-all-fine downpour. And P.S. you can't return a Slurpee. I remember getting on our bikes, candy bag secure on the handlebars and just riding as fast as we could to get home. I learned a valuable lesson about Slurpee cups that day. They are very very very good at keeping the liquid and wetness in the cup and very very very bad at keeping external wetness out.
I'm pretty sure that by the time we got back to Craig's house - ready for a marathon session of Wonder Boy in Monster Land - that my Slupee cup's integrity had completely collapsed and that what was actually holding my Slurpee in place was my frigidly cold hand, covered in a thin layer of wax and cardboardish mush.
I'm pretty sure that I still drank the Slurpee out of my hand though.
