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"Spring", An Essay by Jeff Stimpson
Copyright © April, 2001 Age 39
Today was 73 degrees, and the kids were on bikes. I saw four of them on the way home, including a little girl tearing around the corner of E. 98th and Fifth Avenue as if in a getaway.
Her bike was pink, with fat handlebars and a cushy seat. She and it teetered on training wheels. A man came running after, calling her name and telling her to stop. I don't know if she could stop, or did.
Up the block was a boy on a bike, his mother riding her own bicycle behind him, with a little girl tucked onto her handlebars. "Slow down!" the mother kept calling. The boy would slow for a minute, then wheel away. He almost brushed my pants leg. "God Almighty, slow down..." I heard mom mutter. The boy didn't, though he did circle. His bike had no training wheels.
And further up the street, a dad was dribbling a basketball with his kids. One of the smallest boys apparently didn't have to dribble, but just run around defenders on the sidewalk until he saw an open teammate, then he passed the ball. Lobbed, really. He looked a lot bigger than Alex. On a splendid day like this in some future April, Alex will want to ride a bike.
It's best he doesn't ask to do that now, when he stumbles as he walks and when his feet can't reach the peddles of the fat plastic trike Aunt Julie bought him. Even when he can get a shoe on a peddle, he has little idea of what to do. He prefers to be pushed. He does have a light green ball; he tries to throw it, but it comes off as more of a drop. I try to remember he's just two.
My big brother taught me to ride a bike late, when I was about eight, by wriggling me onto the seat of his Packard-heavy Schwinn and launching me down a hill. The whole thing had a feeling of exasperation on his part. But it worked. Before I could say "milestone" I was sailing and turning in a slow circle, watching the soft dirt of our yard fly under the toes of my sneakers. I have ridden ever since; in fact from that moment I became convinced that my brother was the only person who'd ever be able to teach me to swim. He has never taught me. I still can't swim.
Although I can't remember how or why, I was a normal kid. I didn't spend a year in the hospital. I had no vent tube down my throat, or been jabbed with IV needles to let paralyzing drugs into my bloodstream. If I had any delays learning to walk or eat, nobody ever mentioned them.
I was no athletic prize, but I do remember an occasional home run in gym class softball. In another gym class early in my sophomore year of high school, I could not drop any football thrown to me. From those 40 minutes of effortless grace, I've since built a fantasy life in the NFL, complete with struggling years with Houston and Atlanta and two trips to the AFC Championship with the Steelers. I'd just be going into coaching now.
Alex is too young to fantasize. He's really only just starting his life after a year in hospitals. His therapists say he's doing well "for a kid who spent a year on his back," and I try to appreciate the progress he's made on his feet. One of the problems with recognizing progress in Alex as opposed to Ned, I was telling Jill, is the telescoping of time: Ned's four months have passed in a blink; Alex's first four months were a lifetime.
Still, a bike or a basketball? Alex's trunk sways like a tree in the wind. His eyeballs wobble, though the doctors say he's "compensating well." Going upstairs he's okay, but downstairs he resembles a kitten: dropping a paw off into space and hoping for the best. One toy I can imagine him with is an inflatable pool. He excels in the bath, seeming to swim, his endless skinny legs whipping naturally into a frog kick.
Alex will do his share, if I'm patient. But I've never seen, not even in my fantasies, a patient sports crowd or patient teammates. It's impossible to imagine Alex rounding a base or managing training wheels on a warm spring day.
Tomorrow it's supposed to be only 56.
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