My own set of three wheels

Keeping balance and sanity on a tricycle

BY HELENA BACHMANN MILLIGAN

A few months ago my husband Bob and I were walking around our neighborhood when we stumbled upon a second-hand adult tricycle chained to a tree. “For Sale,” the sign on it read. “$45.”

“We should buy it,” Bob said. “It’s so you.”

An old, rusty, rickety tricycle was so me?

Needless to say, I became quite irate and responded in kind. But that is probably a subject for another article.

What Bob meant to say was that for someone like me, who has refused to ride a bicycle practically since the wheel was invented, that trike was a good ruse to get me pedaling again.

A tricycle is basically just a bike with three wheels (one in front and two in the back), a sturdy alternative for people who are scared of falling from a two-wheel bicycle or don’t have the balance to ride one. I fit into both these categories.

So we bought the tricycle on the spot and I proudly walked it home.

IF YOU FAIL (OR FALL) TRY AGAIN…

I am betting that whoever coined that phrase never fell off a bicycle. I was seven when my bike swerved out of control, ejecting the upper part of my body onto gravel, and the lower part into clusters of poison ivy. I swore to never get on that deadly contraption again.

In later years, as my balance was disrupted by occasional bouts of vertigo,riding a bike was about as appealing to me as steer wrestling.

But now I had my own set of three wheels, and my resolve to keep both my feet firmly on the ground was weakening. True, the old tricycle has seen better days, but – if truth be told - so have I.

Still, one fear churned in my mind.

“What if I fall and look like a total idiot?” I asked Bob. “At my age?”

“You can’t fall off a tricycle,” he replied. “Unless, of course, a truck hits you.”.

SCALING NEW HEIGHTS

Bob did remind me that riding that trike wouldn’t be the first time I’d be – no pun intended – breaking new ground.

Only the previous year, I had done something completely out of character for the klutzy old me – I went paragliding.

How a person who is deathly afraid of falling from a bike could allow herself to be propelled by the wind while strapped into a harness suspended from a parachute, remains a mystery.

Call it a moment of midlife madness, but I suddenly felt a burning urge to experience the thrill of flying with the birds.

I didn’t plan this folly in advance, because if I had, I’d have undoubtedly turned it around in my head, analyzed it, done an Internet search on the risks and hazards of paragliding for clumsy dummies, and, in the end, I’d have chickened out.

So I decided to go for it on the spur of the moment. Within a couple of hours, I found an instructor and soon we were flying in tandem, blissfully carried over hilltops by warm thermal breezes.

It was the ultimate carpe diem moment, the memory of which still gives me an exhilarating adrenalin rush.

EASY DOES IT

“If you can paraglide, you should be able to ride a tricycle,” Bob stated the obvious. “It’s no big deal.”

To drive home the point he took his two-wheeler on a whirl around our cul-de-sac. “See, it’s easy.”

That evening, shrouded in darkness and a hooded parka to remain as anonymous as possible, I got on the trike. Slowly and nervously at first, I pedaled to the end of my driveway. Surprise: I made it intact!

Next, I felt empowered to conquer a new frontier: our street corner.

Little by little, I ventured as far as the Starbucks a mile away, and sometimes I even shed my hooded disguise. True, the worry of falling and looking like a fool splattered on the sidewalk still lingers. And, for obvious reasons, I stay away from poison ivy. But, all in all, I feel a sense of pride and accomplishment for having finally mastered a trick that any four-year-old can do with his eyes closed.

Of course, whenever I am out there pedaling, I keep remembering this quote from the great Mark Twain, who also learned to bike in his boomer years. “Get a bicycle,” the great writer urged. ”You will not regret it. If you live.”

Helena Bachmann Milligan writes for Boomer Life from Florida and from Geneva, where she is Time magazine’s Switzerland correspondent. She is also author of an award-winning novel, “Teeth in a Pickle Jar.”