as easy as …

So my friend Alexis, a freelance journalist, is really bright but grew up in an overprotective household. Her mother never let her ride a bike! So she never learned.

This has been part of her identity for years and a good conversation piece at parties. Of course everyone offers to teach her, but they hardly ever follow through. And I was in that camp for awhile too, only the other day I met up with her on a brilliant spring night on my bike. So she got a brief lesson. Tuesday night she got another — and I got her riding!

(The secrets to teaching someone to ride a bike: make sure they understand that if you start to wobble, you turn into the side where you’re wobbling. Other than that I found it’s just a question of holding their back while they learn to balance, and just getting them comfortable).

Alexis has a little ways to go before she’s a confident bike-rider (she couldn’t yet complete three consecutive cirlcles around me) but she now knows how to balance, and that’s the important part.

“This has been a part of my identity for so long,” she told me. “It’s like losing my virginity!”

Actually in the course of telling this story I discovered that one of my fav. blog-buddies doesn’t know how to ride a bike either, so I guess it’s not a skill people should take for granted.

Congratulations, Alexis — you’ll be riding down Central Park’s hills in no time, the wind in whipping in your face…