By the time I got the Tyke Bike, the paint was scuffed, the leopard spots had worn off, and the white plastic handlebar grips had been yanked off and lost, most likely buried in the back yard by the slobber-jawed neighborhood St. flight bound for Zurich.īefore being handed down to me, my Tyke Bike, like most of the bicycles in my life, had belonged to my brother, Jack, and to both of my sisters, and, earlier still, to cousins or neighbors or some other family from Our Lady of Good Counsel, whose annual parish sale was where we always got our best stuff, bless the Virgin Mary. According to the box, Playskool’s scooter-red and blue and white, with a yellow, leopard-spotted wooden seat, chrome handlebars, and black, white-walled wheels-offered “smart high style” for the “preschool jet set,” as if a little girl in a diaper and a romper were about to scoot along the jetway to board a T.W.A. But Playskool called it a Tyke Bike, so I say it qualifies, and aside from the matte-black, aluminum-alloy number that I’ve got now, which is called (by the manufacturer dead seriously, and by me aspirationally) the Bad Boy, the Tyke Bike may be the swankiest bicycle I’ve ever ridden. It had four wheels, not two, and no pedals: strictly speaking, it was a scooter. I rode it in 1968, when I was two years old and as tubby as a bear cub.

My first bicycle was not, in fact, a bicycle.

I hate bicycle riders in traffic