The Mystery Bike

We take so much for granted. I never saw my dad on a bike. In fact, I never saw him touch a bike. Bikes were for kids and one thing he wasn’t was a kid. He had a tough life, my dad, and I’m not sure when his childhood ended, but it was young. The eldest son of Portuguese immigrants from the Azore Islands, he grew up during the Depression in the rugged, hardscrabble town of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he and his four siblings dug clams and snails just to survive. His father was a carpenter and a drinker and he believed that the only way to get through to his children was to use the back of his hand, or better yet an unfinished chair leg, and my father, as the first son, bore the brunt of it.

My dad started working in his early teens, fought to stay in school against his father’s demands, and eventually escaped into the Marine