Seems to me, a lot of men who are about my age, buy a motorcycle.   I’m just saying.  They get a little gray on the ol’ noodle… or spawn a shiny spot at the top of their heads… and go out and buy a Harley. Or an Indian… or some kind of a ride.  A hog.

On occasion, the Mid-Life Crisis Man looks good on a bike. Other times…..

Wellllll…. let’s just say the black knee socks with the white gym shoes tend to detract…. ever-so-slightly …. from the Cool Factor.

I am not sure what the real reason is for this trend among the 50+ blokes.

Now if I were inclined to buy a bike… it would be just like the kind I had when I was 5 or 6 years old. I loved that old bike. It was blue with white handle grips which had yellowed and cracked with age.   Oh… and Training Wheels.

This bike had been through 4 or 5 siblings before me. It was a boy’s model. I used to wash that thing right alongside my older brother, as he washed the family car. It had those plastic fringy strings hanging out of the handle bars. A shiny metal horn with a black bulb of a honker. That was great fun, I’ll tell you.

I always put a playing card between the spokes. I attached it with a wooden clothes pin. The sound it made was the best… that bbbhhhhtttthhhhhhhd when you went real fast… and that phthp… phthp… phthp… when you crept along.

Once, my Aunt Doty told me that diamonds were a girl’s best friend. (She and I shared the same birthstone. Diamond.)  So when I would select my card out from the deck… I always took the diamonds.  Seven was my first choice. Then the Ace, Queen… it goes on.

Ahhhh….. I wonder how many times my folks had friends over to play Bridge… and the decks came up short on diamonds. I bet it happened a lot.

But yes. That is the kind of bike I would buy now. Training wheels and all. I’d get it in my size. I mean, riding around on a tiny little bike would just be silly.

Okay, so I know the cool factor might not be ALL there. Yet I think ultimate beauty can be defined by whatever gives you joy.

I would have to have keep the training wheels though. It was my favorite thing about my first bike.

As adults, maybe that is what we need in our lives sometimes. Training wheels. Just because we are older, doesn’t mean any one of us knows everything. We shouldn’t pretend to.  We are not perfect, after all.

But a good set of training wheels as we try to navigate through life would be…. the best. We could bobble back and forth a little bit, when things get rocky. We might wobble, but we wouldn’t fall down. And…. in the end, we could maintain our balance, and keep rolling along down the path.

“You can do anything, but not everything.”

– David Allen