The Skid

Last week my mother and father-in-law bought my son his first bike. You know, the two-wheel kind. He’s had a couple of tricycles and a scooter but it was the right time to move up the big leagues. It wasn’t long before he learned how to “skid”. Watching him perfect it made me happy, and made me think.

One of the awesome benefits of being a parent is reliving your childhood through your kids. Now that is sort of cliché, I know. Before you are a parent you kinda know this. You know that you’ll do all the things with your kid that you did as a child. What you don’t realize is how those moments go beyond amusement and end up informing a more existential inner dialog.

I watched Riley take off up the sidewalk on his bike and thought…Yep. This is one of those moments. But it was his hour-long relentless pursuit of the “skid” that really made me think. I watched him work on getting his speed up and slamming the pedals backwards. Each time he’d look back and ask me…

Was that a good one Dad?

I’d get overly excited and tell him it was. I was envious of his ability to concentrate on something so simple for so long. It consumed him. Riley knows nothing of life ahead of him. He doesn’t know the things I do about disappointment, challenge, failure and all the things that make up our experience. All he is concerned with is the harder he hits the pedals, the longer that little rubber mark is. That’s enough to make him smile, again and again. This enjoyment from something so simple is what I think we are envious of as adults. We want that back.

Our lives as adults are plagued with “what’s that for”, “what does that mean” and “do I have time for that”. A skid however doesn’t care about those things. Neither does his maker. Its existence springs from a child’s effort to amuse himself. That’s all. I can’t remember the last time I was so consumed by something so trivial. Everything I do has meaning and purpose. I have no “skid”. I miss that.

It was getting close to dinner time and Riley needed to go wash up. Like most parents I started giving him a countdown. “Five more minutes Riley.” “Two more minutes Riley and we have to go inside.” I couldn’t help but think I was representing some bigger clock. Some clock that eventually will have no time left for skids. I need to remember that when I rush my kids from one innocent moment to the next.

Maybe a couple more minutes would do us both some good.