Oyster Culture

I have two vivid memories of my dad saying to me, “You’re gonna have to learn to do this by yourself.”

The first was riding a bike and his exasperation came from having to give me a hundred pushes but then also having to catch up and run behind me as I peddled. He held onto the back of my bicycle seat with one hand, trying to keep up, exhausted after just a few hundred feet of that nonsense. (And once we’ve all attempted that awkward move ourselves as parents, we realize that crap’s for the birds.) Well, my dad figured out that pushing off of the curb with one foot provided the launch I needed and when coupled with a bike that was just a tad too small for me, I had the foot reach I needed to keep myself from falling over. Necessity breeds invention, so they say, and he stopped having to wear himself out while I, like every other child in the world, learned to ride a bike.

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