I can ride a bicycle

It was Christmas morning of 1998, I had been up all night in eager anticipation of every child’s favorite day of the year, Christmas. Nowadays, Christmas is about family, good food, and a break from the stressful situations of college. However, back then it was about one thing, presents. I had been waiting for months for this morning it was the morning when all my desires would be fulfilled and I would get everything I could ever want, until my birthday at least. After waiting, what seemed to me, as all night, my parents finally told me and my sister we could come out of our rooms and open up our presents.

                 Storming out of my room and down the stairs, I hardly noticed the colorfully wrapped presents or the many Christmas decorations that adorned our living room. My focus was on one thing, the shiny bicycle sitting in the very center of the room. I had never owned a bike before but, seeing the cool fourth and fifth graders ride them to my school every morning had made a bicycle the pinnacle of my eight year old desires. Over the course of the next hour, I impatiently waited as my parent and little sister opened up the rest of the Christmas presents. I had one thing on my mind, to get out and ride my bike. Finally after what seemed like the whole morning, my parents told me I could go outside and try out my bike.

                I had been waiting for this moment for so long. I was the first of my friends to have a bike so, I had never ridden one. I could just imagine the looks on my friends’ faces when I pedaled up to their house on my new bike instead of walking like they had to. During this daydreaming, I had wheeled my bike to the center of our driveway so I would have a clear path for my first bike ride. I lined up the bike so that it was pointing directly at the end of my drive way and swung one leg over the bike. Holding my balance, I placed one foot on the pedal. Pushing down on the pedal, to get the bike going, I picked my other foot of the ground, prepared to ride forward. However, the moment I took my foot of the ground I lost my balance and promptly fell off the bike and onto my face.

                For the next week, I refused to even try to ride the bike again. It was not possible to do. In all my daydreaming of getting my own bicycle, I had failed to even think about the fact I would have to learn how to ride it. To make matters even worse, two of my friends had also received bicycles for Christmas and learned to ride them within the week. I was furious. I would see them riding around the neighborhood, while I could only walk. However, I still hadn’t built up the courage to try riding it again.

                At the end of the week, my dad came home from work and said he had a present for me. He told me to come out to the garage and see what it was. Naturally I hurried out to see what present I could possibly be getting so soon after Christmas. There in the garage was my bike. However it was different. On both sides of the back wheel was an extra set of wheels. I had gotten training wheels on my bike. With a little encouragement, my dad persuaded me to try to ride it again.

                With the little extra confidence the training wheels gave me, I once again mounted my bike in our drive way. I placed one foot on the ground and the other on the pedal, as I had done previously. In this position, I sat for several minutes brooding on the result of my last attempt to ride the bicycle. Finally, I plucked up the courage and kicked off, to ride down the street. This time was different; I shakily pedaled several times, going almost fifteen yards before eventually losing momentum and falling off. Even though I had fallen off, I had actually ridden the bike! From this point on I was not afraid anymore.

                Over the next several weeks, I was able to ride farther and farther distances until I was rarely falling ever. It was at this point, I realized that learning to ride a bike was a major step in my childhood. I was no longer confined to the walking distance of my neighborhood. I could ride to school. I could ride to the store. I could ride to my friends. Learning to ride a bike didn’t just give me a source of entertainment. It gave me my first real sense of independence.  

Charter fishing

                When I was a little kid, back in the kindergarten and first grade days, my three favorite things in the world were boats, trains, and trucks. So when my dad told me, one afternoon, that we were going on a charter boat to go fishing I was more excited than if we were going to Disney land. We spent the whole afternoon getting our fishing gear ready for the trip and pulling our “fishing clothes” out of the depths of the closet. Just as the sun was sinking behind the rolling California hills, we set off driving to the Ventura harbor where the boat awaited us.

                The drive was a short one only fifteen minutes. When we got to the harbor, we met up with my dad’s longtime friend Paul, who I had always referred to as Uncle Paul. At this point it was fairly dark and we decided to get some food from one of the restaurants on the harbor before the fishing boat left in an hour. I was so excited about getting on the boat that I hardly paid any mind to my dinner and quickly finished it. After finishing my fish ‘n’ chips, my dad said we were heading to the boat to get ready to cast off.

                When we arrived at the dock the boat was on, I could hardly hold in my excitement. The situation was only exacerbated by the fact that it was already well past my bed time and we hadn’t even hit the open ocean yet. The captain of the boat came onto the deck and told us we could board the ship. I was in awe I remember thinking I wanted to be just like him one day, a captain of a ship all my own. Once on deck he explained the safety rules but I was hardly listening. In fact, I only noticed when my dad pushed a life jacket over my head and buckled the straps around me. Then the members of our group started discussing the details of the rout we would take in the ocean and began collecting a pool for whoever could catch the biggest fish. After what seemed like an agonizingly long time we set of towards the mouth of the harbor and the open ocean.

                At the mouth of the harbor, the surf started to roll in and rock the boat back and forth in a rhythmic motion that was only interrupted by the occasional rouge wave interrupting the rhythm. I couldn’t believe it we were at sea. Soon we left the harbor far behind, heading out into the blackness of the ocean that was only interrupted by the glistening oil rigs in the distance and the white caps of the waves on the ocean. I remember it was a fairly calm night with little wind to pick up spray from the top of the waves. At about two miles out my dad set my line and pole and I started trolling for fish along with the other twenty people on the charter boat. I was convinced that I would catch something the minute my line hit the water but, sadly I was mistaken.

Over the course of the next few hours we trolled back and forth several miles out to sea. Many of the people on board the boat seemed to be getting lucky and reeling in some good sized fish. My dad caught two White Sea bass, which he informed me were good for eating. More exciting to me, however, was my “Uncle Paul’s” catch. He had managed to catch and reel in a small shark. I convinced him to let it go though because I told him the mom shark would get mad and come after him. However, in all this time I had yet to get so much as a bite on my line.

Finally three hours into the boat ride, I got my first bite. I felt my line jerk and instinctively looked at my pole. It was bending down towards the water and I knew this was the sign that I had caught a fish. I began to try and reel the line in but it was quite hard for me, being only a 65 pound 6 year old at the time. With some help from my dad we slowly reeled in my catch until we could see the fish alongside the bow of the boat. It was a big fish. My dad reached down with the net and brought it on board. I had caught a barracuda! My dad told me that a barracuda was a vicious fish that ate almost any fish smaller than it. I felt so proud at having captured such a predator. However my glory was short lived.

Only moments after catching my fish the rolling of the ocean finally got to me and I became seasick. I spent the next hour of the trip leaning over a bucket in the bathroom sick. I decided then that boats were not my favorite anymore; I liked trains and trucks much better.

When we got back to the dock, we all got off the boat and weighed our catches. My barracuda weighed in at 22lbs over 3lbs more than the next closest fish. My dad told me that because of my fish I had won the entire pool for the boat a total of $225. But I didn’t care about the money I only cared that I had caught the biggest fish on the trip.

Conversation #3

I met with my conversation partner for the third time today. We had not met in a while because  she had gone back to Venezuela for two weeks to sell her house and do a few other things so she could focus full time on living in America. Naturally I asked her how it was returning to her home country for the first time in a couple of years.

When I asked her how it was to return to Venezuela, Peggy responded with a mixed reaction. On one hand, she said that it was good to be back in a familiar place surrounded by people she knows and loves. But on the other, going back was an eye opening experience for her. She said it made her realize how lucky she was to be living in the United States now instead of Venezuela. While she loves her home country, she is disappointed in the government and the many problems it has caused. She told me about the political turmoil in Venezuela surrounding the upcoming election. Apparently in October, Venezuela is holding its six year presidential election. Since 1999, Hugo Chávez has been the president of Venezuela but, in the last election there was much speculation about the legitimacy of the outcome. My conversation partner says that right now feels a lot like it did back then. She said that most people are excited and hopeful that they have enough support to elect a new president. However they are also wary that the election might be rigged so that the majority vote does not count. This was shocking to me. I couldn’t imagine living in a country where I was distrustful of my government on some of the most basic levels, such as the integrity of an election. Trying to change the subject to a more lighthearted one I asked her what she enjoyed about going back.

The best thing she said about returning to Venezuela was getting to see her friends again. She told me that for the two years she has lived in the US she has hardly made any friends because of the language barrier. Going home, she said, was a blessing because she got to see all her friends and rekindle many of her relationships. I imagine it is comparable to going home for summer after your first year at college. She told me that she frequently kept up many of her relationships back home over the phone but, there was no substitute for actually seeing and visiting the individuals in person. This is something I felt I could completely relate to. After hearing all of this I asked her if she had ever used Skype to talk to her friends back home. Surprisingly to me, she said she had never heard of it. I spent the last ten minutes of our conversation trying to describe to her what Skype is and how she could use it to communicate with her friends back home. In the end, I think I was able to get the message through to her and she seemed rather excited about it. However, I’m still not sure if she was able to figure out how to use it. I plan to ask her about it during our next conversation and hope it will help her reconnect with her friends back home.