My Bike Club
I had the most wonderful childhood. I grew up in San Diego, where it rains about two days a year, and it’s always sunny and bright. I could ride my bike just about any day of the year, and had lots of friends. My best friend was George Kenny. George lived just a few houses down the block from me and we were the same age. Actually, I was about 28 days older than him ? a fact that I always threw in his face. “You must respect your elders,” I would sometimes tell him. That usually got a nasty response from him. Anyway, George came up to me one day and said, “Hey Richard, why don’t we form a bicycle club?”
I thought about it for a while, and then he said, “We could give ourselves a cool name and get hats and stickers and have lots of fun. What do you say?” I immediately fell in love with the idea. “You bet, Georgie Porgy!” I used to call him that all the time even though I knew he hated it. Well before we knew it, we got a couple of other guys together and came up with the best name for a club ever. We were the “White Skulls.” Why we chose that name, I’ll never know, but all the kids seemed to like it, so I was okay with it, too.
The four of us went to the local bike shop and we each picked out a skull decal to put on our bikes. I chose a green one, while Georgie Porgy picked red. He shouted: “I am the red skull! I am the king of the club! If you don’t like it, try to take it from me!” George was a pretty big guy, so no one argued with him. We rode our bikes everywhere and had a great summer. That’s how we formed the greatest bike club ever!
