7-B 1st Bike Ride (Con’t). Song: “Let It Be” Photo: Our Driveway Showing the Hill I Went Down on My First Ride on a Two-Wheel Bicycle at Age 4.
On my first time, ever, riding a two-wheeler bike, I went sailing down our street in the above photo with no way of steering or stopping. My big brother had put me on his bike which he didn’t want because he only wanted a racing bike. He had loosened the handle bars, and put me on the bike seat he had adjusted to its highest setting. Then, he rolled me out of the driveway, and gave me a big shove down the street (shown in the photo above).
I knew if I managed to sail straight through the 4-way intersection at the bottom of the street of our growing neighborhood, I would fall in the long thick layer of freshly dumped white pebbles on the unfinished side. Cars which had left the neighborhood, had dragged lots of those white pebbles (which all looked like little teeth) onto the blacktop where they had come unstuck from car tires that had plowed through, and I thought that I could even slide on those pebbles, or get hit by a car coming into the neighborhood, or leaving. But, just before I reached the bottom of the street, the handle-bars that I couldn’t reach because they had fallen loose (and were dangling like a pendulum the whole whole time that I was sailing down the street) suddenly slid all of the way over to the right, and stuck making the bike off-balance which also made the bike’s front end start shimmying uncontrollably. I leaned toward the right with bare legs, no shoes, and no shirt, hoping that I could fall in the soft thick grass toward the right side of the street, but if I had made to over that far, I would have, instead, slammed into the street’s large new painted black iron square sewer drain. I barely missed that sewer drain, and crashed straight into the telephone pole at the very bottom of the street. As I reached my arms around it in the attempt to brace my fall, my stomach landed a “ringer” into the bottom spike of that telephone pole. It tore a hole right through my skin which kept me stuck helplessly with my feet unable to touch the ground. (This was the kind of telephone pole that had climbing spikes with the ends angled upward, so that the workers who climbed up on them didn’t slip off.) Either did I. Who knows… maybe I had something to do with why they stopped having those bottom spikes. In any case, I was impaled on that spike, and unable to touch the ground. And, because the lip of the spike went upward, I couldn’t lift myself up high enough to either get off, or to get loose. There I hung helplessly unable to get unstuck because I was wrapped around, and dangling on a telephone pole spike.
The good thing was that I stopped before entering into the intersection so didn’t get hit by a car. The bad thing was that as time went on it seemed that there wasn’t ever going to be a car, or anybody (including my brother) anywhere around. As my body weight held me on that spike, I tried to shinny up the pole, but the more I wiggled around the more I bled, and that made everything slippery. My bare legs were sliding from my blood on the wooden telephone pole. There simply wasn’t any way of lifting myself up or off. I couldn’t get unstuck for the life of me, and I hung there for such a long time that I realized I may just hang there and die. Than I remembered that Jesus had died in a very similar way.
The more wiggling around I did trying to get loose, the more I bled. The more I bled, the more tired I became. The more I cried out for someone to help me, the more I realized there simply wasn’t anybody around who was going to help. And, no cars drove by our neighborhood’s only entrance while I kept trying to gather up enough strength to get myself loose again, and again. I could see where my blood dripped down that new wooden pole in thick bright red clumps, and it joined in with the line of blood headed toward the ground below my feet.
Soon, I didn’t have the strength to even yell for help anymore, and was so weak that I just wanted to sleep, but I opened my eyes, and saw a vision. Just a few feet away, and a little bit higher above me was a nun dressed in a slow waving bright bluish robe. I saw her from her side, and she was holding something in her hands while praying. (Not being Catholic, would a three year old have any idea what a rosary even was?) The silhouette of her face looked formed by a gel-like line, and inside that line was white-like florescent light, so I couldn’t distinguish the face. Then, I had an exuberant feeling of suddenly completely knowing that I didn’t have to be afraid anymore at all.
Maybe, because I was teetering on the brink of death (which I later learned can be the time that people see these sorts of things) I was able to see her. Maybe the reason that I saw that nun praying was because she was actually trying to get me to look up again to see if she was still there? Maybe if I didn’t keep trying to see her by lifting my head up, I might have fallen asleep and died! Despite seeing this, I couldn’t help that I was falling asleep. Finally, I only had the strength to lift my head up one more time just because I wanted to see if she was still there. It was during my last effort to see if she was still there that I also saw that there were others (not nuns) who had come down from much higher above. That made me stay awake a little bit longer because I was trying to see what else was suddenly going on. What I then saw were lines forming a group of other robed figures, but they were all bright white.
One of them briefly went over close to the nun, and then went back to convene with the rest of the group who were higher up where it was too much of a strain for me to see around the telephone pole. They were having some kind of discussion among themselves which I think I wasn’t supposed to know about. Then, they all disappeared when I heard a sound.