When I was about ten or eleven years
of age, my father decided to buy me a
Bicycle from a Sears catalogue we had.
I remember he paid forty-seven dollars
for it, its colour was red and white and I
watched him put it together in the kitchen.
I drove around the place as proud as
I could be on my brand-new bicycle,
Sometimes my brothers would ride it.
I’d sail down the hills in my hometown
all out, as fast as it could possibly go.
I was lucky I never had an accident.
When the tubes and tires wore out, I
would get new ones at the store in nearby
Placentia town, my mother would always
Give me the money, it would cost about
one dollar for each, the years passed,
and I went away and returned after four
or five years, in the end it wound up in
my uncle’s yard, for some reason or other.
It came up in a conversation with my
now-deceased first cousin, that the front
wheel was threw in with rocks and other
debris when my uncle was making a
concrete step for his back door and it is
still there to this very day, embedded in
concrete, the rest of it was discarded to
somewhere else to rust away into infinity.

Frank Rowe
St. John’s, NL