I lost my own Dad when I was just three years old. My mother, 32 at the time, was a full-time nurse who had to raise her four kids on a single income, so, in reality, she was probably a bit more than full-time. She was an amazing woman, a real-life superhero to all of us, but all that time spent working to survive meant she was really shit at fixing bikes.
Between the ages of three and seven, a puncture was to my bike what brain cancer was to my Dad—terminal. A flat wheel on my bike condemned it to the scrapheap indefinitely.
We didn’t put my Dad on the scrapheap, you understand. We buried him properly, of course.
It wasn’t just bikes either. If something ran out of batteries it rarely ever seen the light of day again. I don’t know if that was because we were poor or because my parents were too busy working/lying in a wooden box 6 feet under ground, either way, the scrap heap beckoned.
Things changed when Mum met Brian. Confusingly, this was also my Dad’s name, but it was a different Brian. A very much alive Brian. I’m not sure where she had the time to meet Brian, what with being too busy to fix our bikes and all, but meet him she did. I was too young to show either interest or disdain toward him, and we got on as well as a seven-year-old and an adult possibly could.
That indifference changed dramatically one Saturday afternoon when Brian found my old bike buried in a hedge in the back garden. I told him it didn’t work anymore because it had a flat wheel.
“Let’s see what we can do about that,” he said, carrying the tiny bike in his gigantic hands.
Brian was a pig farmer. He was a big, strong man. Not the kind of strong you become by lifting weights in a gym, but the kind of strong you become from wrestling sows for a living. From a seven-year-old’s point of view, at least, Brian might as well have been a giant. If you told me this man ate an entire pig for his breakfast, I would have believed it. So you can imagine my concern when he sent me to the kitchen to bring him two spoons. Was this giant about to eat my bicycle?
He flipped the bicycle upside down and, with a couple of rusted spanners, pulled the front wheel off and sat it on top of a makeshift table we had built in the backyard. He then handed me one of the spoons and showed me how to scoop the tyre off the rim. He took the next 20 minutes to show me how to fix a bicycle tyre.
We removed the inner tube, blew it up, then waited for my mother to leave the kitchen before we dunked it into a sink full of soapy water. We located the hole and, with an old puncture repair kit he had in his van, patched it up and put it all back together.
We then searched the overgrown garden for my brother’s bike, which he let me fix all by myself.
‘Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, but teach a man to fish and he’ll drink beer on a boat with his boys for a day.’ Or something to that effect.
Brian’s time with Mum was fleeting; she died a couple of years after meeting him. But somewhere in that short window of time, 33 years ago, Brian taught me how to fix a bicycle tyre, and I’ve never gotten to pay that wisdom forward.
Until now.
On Saturday past, my eldest girl was complaining that her bike was too small for her. With no birthdays or Christmas on the horizon, it was time to get resourceful. We took a walk to an old shed on our family farm to see what we could find. After much uncovering, we found a total of 12 bikes buried in the shed. Some belonged to us, some to our cousins and at least one, judging by its condition, belonged to somebody’s great-great-grandparent.
It’s been a while since any of my kids got new bikes, so I took the opportunity to give them all something a bit more appropriate for their size. We picked out the most suitable and dragged them down to the garden, where I was proud to be able to pass on a lesson taught to me 33 years before.
We fixed punctures, lubed up chains, adjusted seat posts and tightened brakes. Each of the kids got to pick a bike that fitted them better than their current mode of transport. Cian had to go for a pink and white bike, which is unfortunate for him, but that is the cost of having only older sisters.
Saorlaith spotted my old bike trailer in the shed that I used to take them in when they were smaller. They’ve all outgrown it now, so Saorlaith asked if we could repurpose it for her bike so she could carry her teddies in it.
So we did that too.
Then Cian found a battery powered jeep that had been dumped in the shed when it stopped working a few years ago.
It got dragged out too
We used a multimeter to do some fault-finding and traced the problem back to a blown fuse. We didn’t have a replacement, and Jeff Bezos couldn’t deliver one until Tuesday, so I took the opportunity to teach my boy how to improvise. I had a stash of blade fuses in a drawer from a previous project, so we engineered one to fit into the toy car. And by engineered, I mean we beat the shit out of it with the shaft of a hammer to force it into a hole it had no business fitting into.
When Jeff’s replacement fuse eventually arrives, it likely won’t fit into the newly formed hole, so we will probably leave that as it is. The likelihood that the jeep will go on fire someday is fairly high, but at least that leaves plenty of room for a lesson on fire safety at some point in the near future.
Cian jumped into the jeep and immediately crashed it into the wheelie bins, so, as it turns out, it may not survive long enough to go on fire anyway.
My children have probably forgotten about Saturday already, but I haven’t, and I won’t. A few quality hours spent with the kids when they weren’t fighting with each other or looking for screens to watch. My wife and sister had a few drinks in the garden watching us. They questioned some of our engineering ability at times, but when all was said and done, we had three very happy children, seven working bikes, a new teddy bear trailer and a jeep that may or may not burn our house down someday. That is a bridge we can cross if the time comes. Or, if Cian is driving, that is a bridge we can drive over the edge of and plummet to our probable deaths.
All my kids went through a phase of telling everyone that their Daddy is really good at fixing things. The girls have grown out of it now, but Cian still does it occasionally. I like to keep that feeling alive inside them all, even if they don’t say it out loud. Saturday was a flat wheel on a bike; someday soon, it will be a flat wheel on a car. And I’m sure, at some point down the road, there will be something more serious that needs fixing, and I can only pray I’m the person they call when that time comes.
Anyway, I’d best be off. I think I smell something burning.
You are a very good story teller David. I could really see everything you were describing!
Oh I'm sure the kids won't have forgotten that day. And at least you have photos from it, so it'll come straight back to them like it was yesterday when they see the pics, no matter their age.