Narrative Essay

“Are you ready?” he said. He seemed so calm and confident.
“Yeah, I guess,” I whimpered. He saw the distress on my face. He heard the terror in my voice. He almost seemed frustrated, not at me, but because he knew he could not help. He knew I could do this. He gazed down the hill again.
“You can walk your bike down if you like, but I know you can do this.” How could he be so sure? I did not want to let him down.
“No, I want to do it.” He was proud of that answer.
“I’ll go down first,” he said. It seemed he was gone and at the bottom of the hill before he had even finished that sentence. I stood there staring down at him, with Courtney wiggling in the back seat. I got in position to get on my bike. My heart started beating faster and my breath became louder. I could see my dad yelling something up to me, but I could not hear what it was. Finally I took a deep breath, looked down one more time, and then I jumped on the bike and began to go.
It was on my seventh birthday, September 30th, 1998. I woke up so excited as all kids do. That day my grandparents were starting demolition on a house just around the block from my own. After breakfast my mom suggested riding bikes down to go watch. I loved riding my bike. I had the training wheels off for quite a while and I was becoming acclimated to riding bikes. The bike I had was old. My dad’s friend had given it to him for me. So I went to my room and got dressed. While my mom was still getting ready, she asked me to go out to the shed and get my bike and helmet out. When I opened the shed there it was, a beautiful, new, shiny, purple bike with gears, handbrakes, and a bow wrapped around it. The smile on my face must have been from ear to ear.
“Do you like it?” my mom asked from the back door.
“I love it! Thank you, thank you, thank you.” I took the bike out of the shed and tried to ride it around my house, but since it was bigger, I had quite a lot of difficulties getting on it and riding it. It was as if I were starting from square one again.
Finally my mom came out. She helped me on and off of it. I learned how to use the handbrakes and control this much bigger bike. We rode down the street to my grandparents, but I was much more concerned with my new bike. I fell quite a lot and had some difficulty stopping. Somehow my mom got me off the bike and inside for the rest of the day. My Dad came home around five. I ran up to him still with so much excitement.
“Daddy. Daddy. I got a new bike!”
“You did?”
“Yeah, come see it!” he came out to the shed with me.
“Oh, wow. It is as pretty as you. Do you want to go for a nice long bike ride on your new big girl bike after dinner?”
After we ate my dad got his bike out. His bike had a little seat on the back of it for my little sister Courtney. We practiced riding up and down our street a little more. Once he felt I was comfortable enough we left.
For the first time on a bike my dad took me throughout the entire neighborhood. I was looking around at everything that I had never seen before, and I was so preoccupied that I would forget to look at where I was going which got to be pretty dangerous. My dad knew what he was doing when he took me towards Summit Avenue. As we neared the corner I asked which way to go. He said to stay straight, and I listened unaware of what lay ahead. I noticed that it got more difficult to pedal and I was worried there was something wrong with my bike before I realized that it was because we were going up a hill. I pedaled as hard as my little legs could and finally I got so tired I had to tell my dad to stop so that I could have a break. Then we continued back up the hill. It just seemed to keep going up, and up, and up. What I did not realize was that we would have to go down, or I did not realize until we reached the super steep drop.
“Ahhhhhh!” I screamed.
“What are you screaming like that for?” he asked.
“I can’t ride my bike down that. It’s like a roller coaster but worse. And I don’t even like roller coasters.”
“Oh, you’ll be fine. You have your new big girl bike now. You have to use it to go down big girl hills.” The tears started to swell up in my eyes. I was terrified. My dad spent the next few minutes calming me down. Eventually I decided to go down the hill after my dad, when he went down the hill I hesitated to follow and now I was stuck at the top of the hill myself. I did not want to disappoint my dad. I had no idea that he had become as nervous as me. He has told me that the only comfort he had was that at the bottom of the hill was a bunch of bags of leaves, and he would rather me crash into leaves rather than into a fence or curb.
I finally jumped onto the bike and began to slowly roll down the hill. I was trying so hard to keep my balance. My speed started escalating. I was going faster than I ever had on a bike before. The good thing was that my new bike had hand brakes. My old bike had the brakes where you had to push the pedal backwards to stop. If I was on my old bike I would have never been able to slow down. When I was about halfway down the hill I pressed as hard as I could on the brakes. I have no idea how I did not get thrown over the handlebars, I stopped so fast. I made it down the hill. I was still so shocked at what had just happened that I could not even be proud of myself, but my dad was. We finished our bike ride with no other steep hill and drops. We got home safely and told my mother the story over a big piece of birthday cake.