The grandkids are mini-motorheads in the making
For me it all started when my older brother and sister pooled their paper route money and somehow talked our folks into letting them buy a motorized minibike. I was probably 5 years old at the time, and beginning that summer, I could think about few other things. The fever never really abated until my college years when several near misses on the road convinced me that the driving public was conspiring to kill me while on a motorcycle.
I turned my full attention to pedal-powered two-wheelers and never looked back. (Well, except for the hot-red, “mid-life-crisis” Honda hiding under a blanket in my garage.)
Anyway, the lesson here is once a kid falls for a motorized conveyance of any sort, it’s rare he’ll find his way back to the simple and silent side of things. For this very reason, I never brought home a minibike, go-cart or any other such madness when my kids were young. There’s something to be said for going places under your own power, and I wasn’t about to let them fall to the dark side before they’d panted their way through a childhood with pedal-power.
Kristin shares the same sentiment but for another reason altogether. She sees danger in darn near everything and figures motorization just maximizes the risk. (Not a bad stance for a woman whose only son has been back-flipping bicycles and jumping skateboards down staircases for most of his life.)
“For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” And while it’s a good bet that Isaac Newton postulated his third law of motion while thinking only of physics, the same principle sometimes applies to parenting. To deny your own children the joy of fishtailing your backyard into a dustbowl while under power is to virtually assure your grandchildren will be given the tools to do so at the earliest possible age. This explains why my grandsons, age 5 and 3, are now the proud drivers of a battery-powered, two-seat, four-wheel-drive mini-monster truck.
My daughter and son-in-law, after delivering the news, sought to calm us with a hilarious video of the boys rolling across their snow-spattered yard bumping over toys, steamrolling dog turds and even plowing over a plastic snow sled that had recently emerged from the glacier — all with reckless abandon. Their laughter was endless and hopelessly contagious. Furthermore, the barely beyond slow-motion speed at which they traveled assuaged most of Grandma Gee Gee’s fears of imminent disaster.
As for me, I was still in a bit of a huff over what I had earlier pronounced, “The end of the pedal-pushing era before it had even fully begun.”
The cure for that notion came later that evening when Charlotte sent a recording of James at bed time. “Don’t worry Papa,” he said. “I’m still going to ride my bike because I want to be a bike racer like you!”
How are you going to argue a point like that?
Kristin and John Lorson would love to hear from you. Write Drawing Laughter, P.O. Box 170, Fredericksburg, OH 44627, or email John at jlorson@alonovus.com.