By Monte Wehrkamp

They file past the house, in twos and threes, sometimes one by one. Fresh, clean backpacks slung over their shoulders. Some walk in silence, head down. Others engage in bright, cheery chatter.

Ah, the first day of school. I watch the procession, coffee cup in hand, dog at my feet, as she and I make our way along the sidewalk in front of the house. The dog, old, blind and deaf, goes about her business and pays no heed to the parade of boys in rumpled cargo shorts and girls in tight skinny jeans.

But there’s one thing I notice.

No bikes.

For this former bike-to-schooler, it’s weird. Like something’s missing from the first day of school. Like these kids are doing it wrong.

Is it no longer cool to pedal to school? I ask, because I don’t know. Is it better to walk than to wait at the corner astride a 10-speed, waiting for the neighborhood gang to form, then race off together, weaving and jumping and sprinting all the way to the junior high? (There I go again, dating myself. I should say, “middle school.”)

In my day, walkers were lame. Many school days I’d find a way to balance my trombone case across my bars, rather than submit to trudging my way to school. Even when the sky was spitting snow and a bone-freezing wind was racing in from Wyoming or North Dakota, we rode. After basketball or football practice, with hair still wet from the shower, we rode.

My brother set the record for school bike riding. Around third grade, he decided he had better things to do than sit in class. So we’d ride to school, usually with the other neighborhood kids. I’d lock his and my bikes together in the rack and run to my room to beat the bell. However, my brother would double back, unlock his bike, sneak out of the playground, past the playground monitor and the crosswalk guard. Then he was free. He rode to the dime store to buy candy and comics. To the river that runs through my hometown where he’d throw rocks or look for tadpoles. Meander along our town’s bike path, just…because. Some days, he even rode home, watched TV for awhile. But then, right before school let out for the day, he’d race back to the bike rack and be waiting for me as if he’d been in class the whole day. He even found a girl in his class with very adult handwriting to forge my mother’s signature on absence notes to his teacher.

He’d have gotten away with it, too, had his teacher not said to my mother (a teacher herself) during a parent-teacher conference, “He’d have done so much better this semester had he not been so sick.”

“So sick?” Mom asked.

“Yes. Look at all these days he missed.”

“What!?”

Not that this stopped him. A few weeks later, Dad drove home from work early one day. As he drove along, out of the corner of his eye he saw a kid with white-blonde hair, wearing his Sunday corduroys (we weren’t supposed to wear them to school), astride a green 10-speed. Busted again.

So, all you kids walking to school — you’re missing out. I feel a little sorry for you, seeing you trudging along. Not that you have to go to school, but that your means of arrival looks so…resigned. It’d be much better if you were riding your bikes, racing together, beginning your day with a sense of possibility and adventure.

Just ask my brother.