Lawrence Block: Step by Step

If, if, if.

If they’d had training wheels in 1948, it might have been a different story. Maybe they did, and we just didn’t know about them.

With training wheels, I wouldn’t have taken a spill every time I failed to keep my balance. And I wouldn’t have needed my father to run along holding on to the handlebars, and run himself out of breath and patience while he was at it. With training wheels I could have taken the bike out by myself, and maybe I would have stayed with it, and eventually maybe I would have gotten the hang of it.

It might have been different, too, if the bike had been the right size for me. My parents were never cheap, but they and the rest of the country had recently emerged from the Great Depression, and it would be fair to say that they were frugal. They bought me a good bike, but they bought it a couple of sizes too large, so that I wouldn’t grow out of it too rapidly.

That made a certain amount of sense with clothes; you could always take a tuck in a sleeve or hem a pants leg, letting out the garment as the wearer grew into it. But you can’t take a tuck in a bicycle, and mine was indisputably too large for me. It was in fact just the right size four and a half years later, when I hauled it out of the garage and taught myself how to ride.

But we’ll get to that.

Oh, dear. Another thing that might have made a difference, a substantial difference, is if my father had been a good teacher. He was a wonderful man, a very dear and loving man, but a good teacher he emphatically was not.

I’m sure it frustrated him that I didn’t just hop on the bike and ride it, as he very possibly did in his youth. As an adult, his sole athletic activity was golf, and that infrequently, but he was a reasonably good golfer with a fine natural swing, and I suspect he was good at other sports, if not devoted to them.

I don’t know that he was disappointed in his profoundly nonathletic son, but I do know my inability to ride that bike made him impatient to end the attempt. I wasn’t learning, and that meant I wasn’t capable of learning, and wasn’t it simpler and more humane all around to cut our losses and stow the bike in the garage?

Years later, when he taught me to play golf, it went okay. I was lousy at that, too, but I could swing the club and hit the ball and walk to where it lay and hit it again. There was no falling down involved, no test of his patience. I don’t know how many times I went out and played golf with my father — eight or ten, probably, a dozen at the most — but we always had a good time of it.

He taught me to drive, too, and that didn’t go wonderfully. But we both stayed with it, and I passed my test and got my license. I learned a lot more about driving when we took road trips. He was a good highway driver, careful but not timid, and I paid attention and learned.

He was a sweet and loving man, my father was. An attorney himself, he was unequivocally supportive of my decision to become a writer, and disproportionately pleased by my early scholastic and professional triumphs. He was thirty when I was born, and he died the day before his fifty-second birthday. Now, writing about him, I’m already seventeen years older than he was when he died.

And that feels strange. How old was he when he tried to make a cyclist of me? Forty? Two of my three daughters are older than that. His death came four months before the eldest was born.

And it wasn’t his fault that I couldn’t ride a bike, nor was it the bike’s fault. It was, let us be very clear about this, entirely my own.

See, i failed to do what every crawling baby manages to do, which is to keep on trying until you get it right. My father made it easy for me to do this, regarding a temporary failure as permanent; he made it clear that it was all right for me to be unable to ride, and saw it as preferable to continuing frustration for both of us.

And I was happy to accept failure, even eager to embrace it. Part of this, I know, is attributable to the fact that I was an extremely tractable child — which would come as a shock to anyone who has known me only as an adult. I tended almost invariably to accept my parents’ view of what was best for me. I took piano lessons for seven or eight years because my mother, an accomplished pianist, thought I ought to; I had no feeling for the instrument, or for music in general, and I was never at all good at it or got the slightest enjoyment from it, but neither did I beg to give it up, or resent that I was stuck with it. She thought it would be good for me, and I figured she was probably right, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

Beyond that, agreeing that I was hopeless as a bicyclist meant I could stop trying. An unpleasant and frustrating activity could cease. The fact that I would spend years walking while others rode, the fact that I’d be for all those years the one kid in the neighborhood who couldn’t ride a bike, was not something I needed to think about.

All I really had to do was keep at it. All I had to do was get back on the bike every time I fell off. Sooner or later I’d stop falling off, and then I’d be riding. I’d somehow known that years earlier, when I taught myself to walk. But somewhere along the way I’d managed to forget.

So the bicycle went into the garage, and stayed there. I didn’t pay any attention to it, and before long I pretty much forgot it was there.

Before i close the garage door, there’s another story I’d like to tell you about my father. It’s one of which I was entirely unaware until very recently.

When I was eleven years old, I was skipped from the fifth to the seventh grade. My fifth-grade teacher, Mildred Goldfus, was a great believer in hurrying along her brighter pupils; one of three fifth-grade teachers at PS 66, she had in the past been assigned the smarter kids, taught them intensively, and dispatched them all directly to seventh grade at the term’s end.

The school’s policy had long since changed, but Mrs. Goldfus was still partial to bright kids, and she saw two such paragons in me and my friend Dick Lederman. Accordingly she summoned both sets of parents and proposed that we skip sixth grade. Dick’s had the good sense to say no. Mine said yes, and in September I entered the seventh grade, where all my new classmates were a year older than I and not sure what to make of this kid who’d been dropped into their midst.

They all rode bikes, too, but that was nothing new. So did my classmates in fifth grade.

Keeping up with the classwork was no problem. I may have been a dud as an athlete, but nobody ever said I was stupid. And a seventh grade classmate, Jack Dorfman, extended an invitation; he captained a football team, known variously as “Jack’s Team” or “The Wellington Tigers.” (The Dorfmans lived on Wellington Road.) Would I like to join the team?

I said I would, and learned I’d need a helmet and a set of shoulder pads, which my parents dutifully obtained for me. (They did not, I’m pleased to report, buy them a few sizes too large, so I could grow into them.)

And I played. We played tackle football, with the games very capably and quite impartially refereed by Jack’s dad, Phil. I was a lineman, and must have played in three or four games. I think that’s as many as we played. I didn’t particularly know what I was doing, but I endeavored to get in the way of the opposing team’s players when we were running the ball, and move in the direction of the ball carrier when we were on defense.

Three games, maybe four. I wish there had been more of them, and I was sorry when the season ended.

Jack was the president of our grammar school class, and a standout athlete at Bennett High School, where he quarterbacked the football team and played shortstop on the baseball team. After graduation he got a major-league tryout, and an offer to join the Chicago Cubs farm system. He went instead to the pharmacy school at the University of Buffalo; his father owned a drugstore, and Jack would thus be qualified to go into the family business. Because everybody knew you couldn’t expect to make a decent living playing baseball.