“It’s just like riding a bike.”

This expression is lost on me. How can you remember a skill that you haven’t quite mastered?       

I wish I had inherited my dad’s aptitude for bike riding.

He once worked as a bicycle courier for a dental lab, delivering dentures to dentists. He rode his way through the streets of Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, honing his compass sharp sense of direction, dodging trolleys and cars.

Even at his age, my dad would ride again in a heartbeat, if he could mount the bike. That problem solved, I believe he would glide down the road, steering his front wheel toward Borderland Park and beyond.  

Sweethearts since their teens, my parents traveled many roads together, but not alongside each other on bicycles. My mom tried to learn how to ride, but after many tumbles she gave up. I must have inherited my cycling disinclination from her.   

My brother took to biking from his early tricycle years. Family lore has it that he turned his three wheels toward freedom, riding so fast and so far, my parents feared he was lost forever. They were one phone call away from calling the police when he turned up exhilarated and spent.

Years later, they gave him a sleek black Royce 10-speed and I acquired his cast off; a cherry red Schwinn that was too small for me. When I sat astride the bike, I could feel the pavement beneath my heels.  

I liked the foot to floor contact. I was a roller skater, not a biker. Four wheels under each foot somehow grounded me while I moved. With a skate key swinging around my neck I could roll like nobody’s business, but staying up on a bike made as much sense to me as an airplane staying up in the sky.     

I taught myself how to ride. Stepping my feet along the asphalt, I lifted them simultaneously onto the pedals, instead of pushing off. Leaping off the bike brought me to a standstill, until I discovered the handbrakes. I wobbled uncertainly and toppled frequently.

Although my falls are fewer now, I’m essentially the same biker I was then. I get by.

When our daughter approached the typical age for advancing from three wheels to two, I prayed that the Y in bicycle was linked to the Y chromosome she had inherited from her father. He is coordinated, athletic and graceful. In short, he’s my physical polar opposite.

Our vote was unanimous. He would teach her.

By the time she was seven, our daughter was still clinging to her training wheels. She resisted my husband’s expert instruction, his gentle coaxing, and his promise of rides together to Ward’s Berry Farm. I worried she was headed down the same bike path I followed: the path of a timid rider.

A year later, when she was good and ready, our neighbor’s daughter, who was two years her senior, taught her to ride without training wheels in one afternoon. I think I was more jubilant than she was that day. Away she rode down her own path, the one she has ridden ever since. Steady. Natural. Unafraid.  

Bike riding weather is upon us. Time to dust off my bicycle, get my bearings, and steel my confidence to ride with my family to Ward’s.

Here are some resources for adult bicycle riding lessons and advice:

• Classes for adult beginners offered through the Cambridge Center for Adult Education: http://www.bicycleridingschool.org/.
• An eBook recently published: “(Like) Riding a Bike: On learning as an adult” by Alison Stein Wellner.