Guest Blog: Ashley Acuff
Position: Master of Disaster at Sun King Brewing and Events Coordinator at the Speak Easy
“What did a bike as a kid mean to me?”
My bike WAS my childhood.
I’m not going to lie, I had the best childhood. I lived on a cul-de-sac in a (what used to be) small town between Dayton and Cincinnati, Ohio. On this cul-de-sac lived two other families. One with two girls less than a year apart in age, and the same age as my brother and I. The other family had two boys also close in age. Our parents were best friends. Three families. Six kids all within two years in age. It was perfect. We all lived on the street for fifteen years. We grew up together. We learned to ride bikes together. A skinned knee or busted lip wasn’t uncommon. I remember watching my younger brother crash into my neighbor’s trash cans when my dad gave him his first shove after taking his training wheels off. Thankfully the trash cans were empty.
I had a pink and purple Huffy bike. I think I actually had two of them over the course of my childhood. The cul-de-sac did not have heavy traffic, so we went through many buckets of chalk over the course of the summer. We drew roads and obstacle courses for our bikes, then raced each other through the course. We judged each other’s abilities to make tight corners, and much to our parents’ dismay, we made ramps out of plywood and bricks, and pulled each other on rollerblades and skateboards with a rope tied to the seat post.
As we’ve all gotten older, the ‘Paw Paw Gang’ still keeps in touch. Put us all in a room and it’s like no time as gone by. We all have different lives, but it’s a blast to sit a retell stories we all witnessed, which more than likely involved our bikes on that street named Paw Paw Dr.
Want to help us create bicycle memories for youth in Indianapolis? Help support our crowdfunding effort at http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/kids-riding-bikes-in-indy/x/3899796