I can still picture it.
It was bright red, with white handlebars and fat black tires. My first tricycle. It probably didn’t cost much, but to a four-year-old growing up in Whitestone, Queens, it was freedom painted crimson.
Then came my first “real” bicycle—a Huffy.
It wasn’t a Schwinn.
Back then, Schwinn was the Cadillac of bicycles. Every kid wanted one. My family couldn’t afford it, and at the time I noticed. Looking back now, I realize something more important: my Huffy took me everywhere a Schwinn would have. Childhood doesn’t care what badge is on the frame.
Like every aspiring cyclist, I began with training wheels, rocking awkwardly from side to side, convinced I was riding while those little wheels quietly prevented disaster.
My father would jog beside me, one hand steadying the seat while I pedaled with all my might. One day the training wheels were gone, and so was his hand. I didn’t realize he had let go until I looked back and saw him smiling from halfway down the block.
I was riding.
“I’m a man,” I probably thought, despite being about seven years old.
The greatest expedition of my young life followed soon afterward.
I pedaled completely around our block in Whitestone by myself. By today’s standards it was only a few city streets. To me, it was Magellan circumnavigating the globe. The world had suddenly become larger—and somehow more reachable.
Soon my bicycle became transportation, independence, and social network all rolled into one.
My friends and I rode to the neighborhood candy store to see whether the newest Superman comic had arrived. We clipped baseball cards into our spokes to imitate motorcycle engines. Second string players became willing sacrifices.
But Mickey Mantle?
Never.
Even a kid knew there were some things too valuable to destroy.
As the years passed, bicycles became less about neighborhoods and more about horizons.
Friends talked me into riding the Tecate-to-Ensenada ride in Mexico. By the finish my quadriceps were staging a revolt, but the long descent toward the coast made every painful pedal stroke worthwhile. Recovery, naturally, occurred at Señor Frog’s with a well-earned cerveza that tasted suspiciously like modern sports medicine.
Years later I found myself riding along California’s Highway 1 through Del Mar and Santa Barbara. My cycling nutrition was elegantly simple: a granola bar, a Mountain Dew, and youthful confidence that somehow everything would work out.
Then came one of life’s greatest pleasures—watching my own sons discover the same freedom that a bicycle had given me decades earlier. My older son chose independence over convenience, pedaling uphill to high school each morning while the school bus rolled past. The climb built stronger legs, but I suspect it also built character. My younger son learned under somewhat more memorable circumstances. His classroom was a narrow paved trail through the Everglades, bordered on both sides by alligator-infested water. There was little room for wobbling, no luxury of wide-open grassy fields. He learned to ride straight as an arrow, with remarkable focus and determination. Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether the alligators were simply excellent cycling instructors. Fortunately, they never had to give a practical demonstration.
Forty years after those California rides, I found myself cycling again—this time with Backroads through Spain and Portugal.
The bicycle had evolved.
So had I.
Gone was the heavy steel frame, replaced by a featherweight titanium e-bike whose discreet battery quietly compensated for muscles that no longer recovered overnight.
Gone were the convenience-store snacks.
Now lunch featured local cheeses, smoked salmon, crusty bread dipped in peppery olive oil, remarkable wines, and leisurely conversations overlooking vineyards that had been producing grapes for centuries.
The scenery had changed from suburban Queens to medieval villages.
The engine had changed from youthful legs to lithium-ion batteries.
But the feeling was exactly the same.
Freedom.
There’s something poetic about the evolution of the bicycle itself.
From the towering, precarious Penny-farthing—with its enormous front wheel daring riders to pitch headfirst onto cobblestones—to today’s marvels of titanium and carbon fiber, hydraulic disc brakes, electronic shifting, and electric assist, every generation has made cycling lighter, safer, faster, and more accessible. The bicycle may be one of humanity’s most beautifully refined inventions—an elegant machine that has continuously improved without ever losing its essential simplicity.
It even helped launch another revolution.
Before they conquered the skies, Orville and Wilbur Wright owned and operated a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. Building and repairing bicycles taught them precision machining, balance, lightweight construction, and steering dynamics—the very skills that ultimately allowed them to solve the problem of human flight. It seems fitting that humanity learned to balance on two wheels before learning to soar on two wings.
As I look back, I realize bicycles have quietly marked every chapter of my life.
They taught me balance before I understood the word.
They gave me independence before I had a driver’s license.
They carried me toward friendships, adventures, and discoveries that still make me smile decades later.
They became a bridge between generations, carrying first a little boy around a block in Whitestone, then a young man across Mexico and California, then my own sons toward their independence, and finally an aging physician through the vineyards and ancient villages of Europe.
Today, with a little help from modern technology—and an electric motor wise enough to ignore my birth certificate—I continue to pedal.
Not as fast.
Not as far under my own power.
But perhaps with greater appreciation.
The bicycle has never really been about getting from one place to another.
It has always been about freedom, curiosity, and the quiet joy of discovering what lies around the next bend.
For nearly eight decades, it has carried me through life.
And I’m not finished riding yet.