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Thankfully, I have never had that particular bad experience.
How about you?
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The illicit street drug crystal meth is also known as “ice”.
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When I was 15 years old, I received my very first brand-new 10-speed bicycle as a Christmas gift. Prior to that, all the bikes I had ever owned were either used or were complied from bike parts that my two brothers and I collected and built on our own. We’d get parts from junk piles, trash cans, given to us by friends or neighbors, trading and swapping with friends, etc. We grew up poor, so new items were really a luxury that we could never afford. It was a great experience, though, because from about age 7 or 8, I began to learn everything there was to know about the workings of a bike and how to assemble, disassemble, troubleshoot, repair and modify them. It also taught me about the use of tools, which, by the way, we also acquired piecemeal. Our bikes were conglomerations of several brands, makes, models, colors, types, sizes, but most importantly, they worked. Whenever they didn’t work or stopped working, we set ourselves busy at getting them in running order. We were not anomalies either, because our whole neighborhood was poor, it was a rite of passage to build your own bikes. [One day, I should recount on here how we improvised with lack of brakes or no bicycle seat or making our own contraptions to ride three or four kids on one bike. Yet I digress. Back to the story.] Another aspect of being poor kids was lack of transportation. We could barely afford bus fare on a regular basis, so those Rube Goldberg* bicycles of ours took us everywhere around town and back.
Anyway, my mother shocked and surprised me that Christmas with a giant box that took up the entire living room. It was a new bicycle, assembly required. I immediately set about with my makeshift set of tools and spent hours painstakingly following the written instructions, something I had never seen before nor knew they actually existed, and put that bike together. Polaroid cameras were the selfie-like fad of the day, and there are probably three or four shots of me beaming with the finished product. I don’t know how my mother swung it; she was just as poor as she had ever been and was one year into her divorce from my stepfather (after 10 years of marriage), I was so grateful to her you wouldn’t believe it.
I was all over town on that bike, it was a beaut. I took great care of it, I was in heaven. Until that day. I can’t remember if it was two weeks or two months, but my bike got stolen right from our back yard. The loss truly taught me something about owning nice things; someone somewhere might be lurking in the shadows waiting to take them from you. Hmmmmm, I wonder if psychologically, it has something to do with my reluctance for extravagant possessions . . .
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*Rube Goldberg. Look it up, ’lennials.
Randy D 