Many parents have a stolen bike story in their repertoire. A woman I know tells of the time her son left his bike out overnight on the lawn in Tucson, Ariz., and the bike disappeared. The missing bike showed up weeks later abandoned in an arroyo on the other side of the city. Her son adds that when he got his bike back, it had a better set of tires than when he lost it.
A fellow at work tells of the time back in the 1960s when he and his younger brother rode their bikes to an Albuquerque, N.M., bowling alley. They had bike locks. But instead of putting them on, they left them dangling on their handlebars. When they came out of the bowling alley, his trusty Raleigh and his brother's gleaming Schwinn were gone. It was, he said, his introduction to evil.
Evil is still alive and well. A glance through newspaper files finds stories of bikes being lifted from the front of a store in Mount Airy, from a back yard in Northeast Baltimore and by a ring of thieves operating out of Ocean City. In Denmark, bike thefts were so rampant that officials in Copenhagen recently proposed putting 5,000 free bikes, big bulky numbers with advertising on them, out on the city bike racks for anyone to use.
But telling a kid that theft is an old and pervasive problem doesn't take away the pain he feels when his bike disappears. He misses his bike. Nothing in world seems right until it is returned.
Which gets brings us to the stolen bike story my kids have been telling recently, the tale of how Brian got his bike back.
Brian is 7 years old. He recently moved into our neighborhood and struck up a friendship with several kids, my two sons among them.
Late one afternoon Brian was riding his 20-inch bike on a school playground. Some "big kids nobody knew" grabbed his bike and rode off with it.
Shaken and crying, Brian ran to our house, which was close to the playground. There our sitter and my sons offered Brian consolation and a glass of milk. Phone calls were made. Eventually an adult drove around the neighborhood searching for the culprits and missing bike. Neither turned up.
Like most adults, I gave the bike up as a lamentable loss, but a loss nonetheless. The kids, however, felt differently. They believed they could find Brian's bike. And they started searching.
For the next few days every bike that rolled past my sons and their buddies was suspect. At a distance, every bike looked like Brian's to these pint-sized detectives. Their accusations were so careless and constant that I ignored them.
