Someone stole my boy’s bike.

Fortunately, a friend has loaned us one until we buy another, but that bike! I bought it when Dane was 2 – the future rider he’d become, just a pedaling speck in my mind.

That bike inspired a 5-year-old’s self-reliance that would’ve made Emerson proud.

All summer long, we rode, first in circles around the playground; then, into Sausalito or along the Bay Trail between Marin City and Mill Valley.

We put in about 15 miles a week on that bike –– Dane zigzagging along the Bay Trail and me easing my own bike behind him, his 4-year-old sister attached to me on her trail-a-bike.

At first, Dane’s zigzags made my hair stand on end as serious cyclists zoomed by. Eventually, though, he learned to use the right side of the trail, and I watched him more calmly from behind.

Soon he was off-road, standing up to test his tires in the mud, raising a daring hand to point out the great white heron or snowy egret at water’s edge.

Come August, he even advanced to the hilly 5-mile perimeter of Angel Island, working in 100-degree weather with the determination of a yellow jersey rider on the Tour de France.

Now we ride to school. Not many students do this regularly, so, when he pulls his helmet off, his hair sweaty and sticking up, his fellow kindergarteners are incredulous, “You rode again, Dane?” And he smiles shyly with a proud sense of himself.

But riding isn’t about attention; Dane loves what riding feels like. When his sister says, “Let’s go feel the wind on our arms,” we all know what she means.

Let’s just get out and move ourselves along. Let’s pick warm blackberries in September and brush rain off our faces in January. Let’s pedal up steep hills, gasping for air, or speed through puddles, soaking our socks. Let’s have an adventure.

That’s what that bike represented: a boy gaining a sense of himself and a sense of adventure, powered by his own two legs.

I knew that bike wouldn’t last forever, and that Dane would eventually need a bigger one, and that someday he’d ride without me. But that bike marked the beginning of a way of life that extends beyond cars and exhaust, into adventure and self-reliance, and it served as the vehicle for me to witness it.

Boy, I’ll miss that bike.

But, Bike, thanks for that boy.

By Anjie Reynolds

Labels: Angie Reynolds, bike, Marin City, Mill Valley, Sausalito, Tour de France

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I’m a mom who’s ready for school to start up again. Not elementary school -- dental school. My husband’s on break for a week before he starts quarter number five of his twelve-quarter program.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that he gets to hang up his shirt and tie and spend some time with us -- especially since during the school year I’m relentlessly on duty at home while he’s relentlessly on duty at school or studying.

During this break, we’ve been able to do some meaningful activities together; camping at the ocean, riding bikes along the bay, cutting out paper coconut trees in our son’s kindergarten class, drinking homemade lattes on the sunny porch.

He’s gotten to do some meaningful activities for himself, too; tuning our bikes (which I had no idea needed tuning), organizing his tool box (which of course was spread out for several days over said sunny porch), and surfing the Web a lot in his underwear.

But when our kids pulled off their shirts and pants on Saturday to run around the house in their underwear yelling, "I'm Daddy! I'm Daddy!" I felt we’d all seen enough of him for a while.

I found myself eyeing that shirt and tie, happily looking forward to another kind of break.

By Anjie Reynolds

Labels: Angie Reynolds, bikes, daddy, dental school, elementary school, husband, lattes, mommy needs a break, need a break

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I've spent the morning crying for a high school friend.

She was a junior when I was a sophomore, and we were in a couple of clubs together. Really down-to-earth, gorgeous, sweet girl. I haven't seen her since she graduated.

Today on Reunion.com, I read a message she posted last May about her brother. Her brother was a year ahead of her. He was an adorable jock kind of guy and they were good friends throughout school.

Her post said that her brother had lost a three and a half year battle with brain cancer. He left behind his loving wife of fourteen years and their two daughters. And, I noticed in the message, as if it couldn't get any worse, one of his surviving daughters has leukemia.

I wrote my friend an e-mail in remembrance of her brother and to send her and her family my wishes for love and healing. She wrote back quickly to thank me, and then told me her grief was made even more unbearable this August when her eight-year-old boy drowned on vacation just four days after the one-year mark of her brother's death.

Her e-mail told me some days she can't even bear to breathe but she's got two other daughters to care for so she just keeps going for them.

God, I couldn't stop sobbing.

After my first child was born, I was shocked by the fierceness of my love and my desire to protect him. One day, as he slept in my arms, I found myself crying over him, begging the gods that his presence in my life would not be temporary.

Since then, my prayer has broadened to include others closest to me -- my husband and my daughter -- but, always, it is my desperate plea. And I know that as I sit at the computer crying for my friend, it was her plea, too.

By Anjie Reynolds

Labels: a child's death, Angie Reynolds, husband, leukemia, Reunion.com

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The first time I held a baby to my breast to nurse, I felt a wet tugging at my nipple. My body was exhausted from the labor, but when collostrum flowed out into his ready little mouth, I sat there amazed.

Perhaps because I’d just endured a day and a half of labor, and perhaps because I was still reeling with thoughts of I have a baby boy—sweet mother of God! I have a baby boy! I looked down on his pink face too stunned to cry.

Looking down into his moist eyes as they took all of this new world in -- the lights, the shapes, the sounds no longer filtered through what I imagined to be the red canopy of his life for nine and a half months.

I cradled his hot body against mine, and skin-to-skin, thought nothing could be as simultaneously bizarre and natural as this.

When I nursed my babies during their first year, although it often occurred as a responsibility -- something to do in the middle of errands, dinner, phone calls -- I have to admit it was also a break. In fact, if I could arrange it, I usually took my baby, first, my boy, and a year later, my newborn girl, to my room, shut the door, dimmed the lights, and leaned back, cradling them against my bare skin.

Sometimes their hands were chilly, gripping my warm skin a few inches below my armpits, sending tingles into that hollow area; sometimes their nails were too long, scratching the ridged texture of my hardened areola; sometimes their hands were searching, finding my necklace, my chin, my lips, and resting on my cheek; but mostly I heard their sighs and their gulps and closed my eyes with the strange realization that I wasn’t exactly sure just who was nursing who.

By Anjie Reynolds

Labels: Angie Reynolds, baby, Weaning

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Buddy Benton kissed my cheek at my locker in ninth grade.

He’d been wanting to carry my books, hold my hand, or get a kiss from me since I’d met him the year before when I transferred junior highs. He was a little bit goofy and kind of a loud mouth, but we were both soccer players, singers, and honor students, and it was easy to be around him.

I always rolled my eyes at Buddy’s advances and lectured him many times that we were just friends -- especially because he was a Mormon and I was a Baptist. I’d been indoctrinated enough to know there was no chance, no sense in starting anything since our religions were incompatible.

But Buddy stole a kiss on my cheek and something in my heart shifted. With that fast swoop to my face, where I could feel his hot breath on my skin, I felt something I hadn’t known before. Perhaps I felt what it was to be desired; perhaps I felt what it was to desire someone else: to let all the little details I’d ever noticed about him -- his lanky gait, the muscles in his calves, the milky quality of his tenor voice -- awaken something beautiful, fluttery, and tender in me.

To my surprise, after that, Buddy stopped asking for kisses and stopped trying to hold my hand. Maybe he’d gotten what he wanted and was done; maybe he was ready to move on to someone else.

But I don’t really think so.

Instead, maybe he saw the pathetic doe eyes I’d make at him when I thought he wasn’t looking. Maybe he knew my heart had switched over but that I’d never say so -- throughout all of high school -- because we were being raised with different versions of God, different versions of the Afterlife.

In the years following Buddy’s kiss we remained pals -- even excruciatingly so at times, with that familiarity that breeds meanness in hormonal teenagers -- and, eventually, I had other boyfriends and other kisses that went even further, ran just as deep.

But sometimes now, when I look at my children, just ten years shy of the age I was when Buddy kissed me, sometimes I can’t help but wonder about the choices they’ll make in the years to come.

What opportunities will they take or deny, based on the values I instill in them? What will they write about when they’re thirty-six years old, sitting in bed on a Sunday morning with delicate light filtering through the blinds, as they raise a hand to let it rest ever-so-lightly against their cheek?

By Anjie Reynolds

Labels: adults, Angie Reynolds, junior high, kissing

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“That one’s that skinny, and that one’s that skinny,” my four-year-old daughter says, pulling my face close and grabbing my eyebrows into an uneven pinch in each hand.

My right brow looks like it always looks after I wax. Subtle. Full. A clean crescent. My left brow I must now lovingly refer to as “the skinny brow.”

Not so subtle. Not so full.

Yes, my daughter sat in the bathroom and watched me accidentally remove the lower half of my left eyebrow this morning. Much of it. Oh, and she listened to some expletives, too.

Somehow, when I gave the wax strip that glorious, edifying pull from the outside of my eyebrow inward, I had a line of eyebrow hairs the equivalent of a pigeon feather stuck in the strip.

Oh, vanity.

And since the wax strip hadn’t gone all the way to the inner tip of my eyebrow, I had about a half-inch square of brow bulk next to the sleek little line I’d just made.

Given my competence level at this point, the thought of re-waxing it brought visions of no brow at all to mind. However, that inner bulk was so ghastly next to said skinny brow -- I knew something needed to be done.

With the help of our hair-cutting scissors, I went to work. It improved, but let’s just say I eventually ended up with a nick of skin visible in the thick of the brow (bringing to mind the lines the boys at my high school etched onto their scalps in the late ‘80s) and a look of perpetual perplexity.

Oh, vanity.

Eventually, I patched up the nick with some brown eye shadow.

Then, I changed my hair part.

No, I will not be cutting myself some bangs anytime soon.

I’m going to guess my daughter’s not going to ask me to do hers either.


By Anjie Reynolds

Labels: Angie Reynolds, eyebrows

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My son’s been drawing racecars lately. Really good ones. Of course, they’re of the animated Pixar car, Lightning McQueen variety, but he’s six and they’re 3-D, and except that I’ve never seen the number “95” drawn accurately on the door – it’s usually “65” or “92” – they’re pretty impressive.

He’s got the spatial stuff down, as well as the colors and character personality.

But, yesterday he was in some sort of slump. I watched him rip page after page from his notebook and throw them to the floor with just a single line or curve on each tossed page.

“I can’t do it!” he screamed – and this from a kid who doesn’t usually lose his cool. He’s the kid on the playground with his hands in the air, saying, “Excuse me, guys? Excuse me? Could you please stop yelling at each other? Let’s just try to figure this out, okay?”

But in this moment of frustration, he’s irrational. He’s lost his cool because he’s lost his ability to do something he knows he’s capable of doing. I try to explain that it’s temporary; that he’ll figure it out again, that maybe he just needs a break, or a snack.

Truth be told, though, I’m a little nervous for him. Deep down, I’m right there with him.

I think of all the half-written essays in my journal, and the essays I attempt that look nothing on the page like they do in my head, and the rejection letters I’ve received for the ones I’ve completed.

I get scared that, like me, he might wonder if he’ll ever “arrive.”

To have the desire and the ambition, but to feel like you no longer have the knack, or, worse yet, that you never did, is, well, heartbreaking.

But I keep these thoughts to myself, give my boy a hug, and stick to my solution that he take a break, have a snack and try again later.

Imagine, then, the triumph I feel the next morning when he has powered out two fully-sketched, fully-colored Lightning McQueens before I even have the chance to mention breakfast.

By Anjie Reynolds

Labels: Angie Reynolds, Drawing

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