Lawrence Block: Step by Step

So I’d been walking for quite some time, and I was sitting on the floor doing God knows what, and I wanted to look at the paper, and I was about to stand up and walk over there. And then the thought came to me that I didn’t have to do that, that I could just stay down there where I was and crawl. I remember thinking that would be fun, and I remember doing it, but I can’t remember if it was fun or not. My guess is that it was.

I don’t believe I’ve crawled since, except perhaps metaphorically. But I’m sure I could if I had to.

I’m sorry I can’t remember learning to walk. Because it was a miracle.

Oh, not a personal miracle — although, given my own innate clumsiness, it might well have been a marginally greater achievement for me than for the average incipient toddler. No, I’ve come to believe that learning to walk is a remarkable accomplishment for the entire human species, and not so much a miracle of evolution as a triumph of the will.

Nobody’s born knowing how to do it. Grazing animals are on their feet and walking from the moment their mothers drop them; they have to be, or they won’t keep up with the herd. But human infants are born as helpless as hamsters, and walking is something they have to learn.

Or teach themselves, one might say. You can’t read the manual, and, except by example, it’s not something your parents can teach you. You crawl for a while, and then you stand up, and then you fall down. And you stand up and fall down again, and then the time comes when you stand up and take a few steps before falling down.

And so on.

And here’s what makes it a miracle: Every child, but for the severely handicapped, does all this and does it successfully. Some are early walkers, some are late walkers. Some fall a little and some fall a lot. But, sooner or later, everybody walks.

Nobody gets discouraged. Nobody gives up. Everybody stays with the program. And all this with no reward promised or punishment threatened, no hope of heaven or fear of hell, no carrot and no stick. Fall, rise, fall, rise, fall, rise — and walk.

Amazing.

Imagine, if you will, an adult in similar circumstances. Imagine the thoughts running through the adult mind:

The hell with this. What’s the point in getting up when I’m only going to fall back down again? If I keep this up I’m only going to hurt myself. And look like all kinds of a damn fool while I’m at it.

What was so bad about crawling? I was pretty good at it. I got around just fine. Why would God give us hands and knees if he didn’t expect us to get from place to place on them?

Who says everybody’s meant to walk? It works for some people, but that doesn’t mean it works for everybody. You need balance, for one thing, and you need good foot-eye coordination, and some of us aren’t gifted in those departments.

I hate falling down. Makes me feel like a failure. Why reinforce that feeling by repeating the process?

It’s hopeless.

What’s the point, anyway? I mean, it’s not as if there’s any place I really have to get to. What’s so bad about right here?

Screw it. If crawling’s not good enough for them, they can pick me up and carry me. Because I’ve had it.

I quit.

But that never happens. I couldn’t begin to guess what goes through a kid’s mind when he’s learning to walk, but I don’t think the possibility of giving up ever enters into the equation. Sooner or later he learns. And, once he learns, he never forgets. Why, it’s like riding a bicycle.

And there’s the rub.

I couldn’t learn to ride a bicycle.

Let us be clear about this. Being unable to ride a bicycle is very nearly as incapacitating for a boy as being unable to walk. In Buffalo, where I grew up, you rode your bike everywhere. You rode it to school, you rode it to play, you rode it everywhere except for those few places so far away that you needed a bus or a streetcar, or a parent to drive you.

When I was a little kid I had a tricycle, and I could ride that just fine. Nobody ever had to learn to ride a tricycle. You put your feet on the pedals and turned them, and how hard was that? No balancing act was required, because the thing wasn’t going to tip over. You’d have to work some to make it tip over.

So I was fine on a tricycle. Then when I was seven or eight, around the time when a lot of other kids were getting their first two-wheelers, I got a four-wheeler, a weird contraption that ran on arm power; you gripped the handlebars, pulling them toward you and pushing them back, and the thing rolled forward at a pretty decent pace. I’ve never seen another one of these creatures, never knew another kid who owned one, but in recent years I’ve seen pictures of something that looks a lot like what I had, and it seems to be called an Irish Mail.

I wonder whatever happened to mine. I suppose I outgrew it, and I suppose my folks gave it away, and I suppose it’s long since been reduced to rust. And I’m not likely to turn all Citizen Kane about it, either, but I remember it fondly. And I probably rode it longer than I should have, because I couldn’t learn to ride my goddamn bike.

It was an orange and black Schwinn, if I remember correctly, and it was a one-speed machine, because that’s all that existed at the time. This was 1948, and bikes didn’t have gears, or if they did nobody I knew was aware of it. They didn’t have handbrakes, either; you braked the thing by reversing the direction of the pedals. They were, I suppose, pretty primitive compared to what kids pedal around on nowadays, and nothing you’d want to take to the Tour de France, but, all things considered, they worked just fine.

For everybody else.

I don’t remember getting the bike. It was a major present, certainly, and I would think it must have been given to me on a major occasion, probably a birthday. I was born in June, and that’s a logical month to give a kid a bicycle. Buffalo’s winters aren’t quite as bad as you think, but they’re a long way from bike-riding weather, and a Christmas bike would be a deeply frustrating present. “Here you are, sonny. It’s all yours, and sometime in April you’ll be able to ride it.” Wonderful.

It was my father’s job to teach me to ride the thing, and we went out to the sidewalk in front of our house. I mounted the bike, he took hold of the handlebars, and he trotted alongside as I pedaled and built up momentum. Then he let go, and I fell down.

Repeatedly.

For our purposes here, I rather wish I could remember the whole process in more detail. On the other hand, it’s probably not such a bad thing that my recollection has blurred a good deal over the years. They say that childhood memories return much more sharply in later life, and maybe this one will, but if it doesn’t, well, that’s okay with me. Because it was not a happy time.

As it is, I don’t know if my dad and I devoted one day or a full week to the process. A man who lived across the street — Joe Rosenberg, who ultimately became my stepfather — told me how it had broken his heart to watch me and my father, going back and forth on the sidewalk, all to no avail. That would suggest that we tried this more than once, but my memory has collapsed the ordeal to a single day, one which concluded with the two of us returning to the house, bowed in mutual recognition that the entire enterprise was impossible, and that we were best advised to abandon it forever.

And so we did. The bike went in the garage, where it assumed the function of the Elephant in the Living Room That Nobody Talks About. Ours was a wonderful family, and I’ve always felt myself to have been sublimely gifted with splendid loving parents, but this is not to say that our living room lacked a fair number of unacknowledged elephants.