Sometimes I would be pulled toward a rhythmic thumping in the distance. Transfixed, I'd bike toward the sound's origin: a group of teenage boys hanging out at a garage basketball hoop, softly illuminated by a streetlight filtering through expansive elm branches like moonlight in a forest. Their thumping wouldn't miss a beat as I glided slowly by, spying on their nightly ritual. To them, a 10-year-old girl on a bike was invisible.

As I grew older, I traveled faster and farther on my bike. At the end of my fifteenth summer, after biking hundreds of miles through Europe on a student hosteling trip, I returned home to hang out with my gang at the corner store. Leaning over my handlebars, casually admiring the oval tan lines left on my hands from bike gloves, I challenged the boys to a race around the lake. Greg - a heartthrob who never gave me the time of day - and I led the pack. But I soon broke ahead. As the night air rushed past me, I pumped my pedals with all my strength, snatching glances at my hardened leg muscles, leaning low over the handlebars to lessen the wind resistance. The bike, which a few years earlier had brought me anonymity, was now clicking and humming with power. Breathless and dripping with sweat, I was first to arrive back at the store. I greeted my bewildered girlfriends, who had yet to feel the strength gained from breaking away from the pack.

Thirteen summers later, I was working in my downtown office when a bicycle messenger delivered a package. I looked up from my computer to sign the receipt and was startled to see that the messenger was Greg. He pointed to the bike next to my desk and said, "You owe me a rematch." Then he was gone. The 15-year-old inside of me snickered, still thrilled to have won that long-ago race.

Later still, during a winter of personal sadness, a friend invited me to live with her in her grandmother's apartment in the south of France. Each morning I'd sit in the sunny kitchen, drinking milky coffee out of a bowl and eating oranges and warm croissants. On the map spread before me, I'd plot my route. Each day I traveled miles down to the sleepy seashore, past cafes and discos not yet open for the season, through vineyards, up winding roads to the foothills of the French Pyrenees. I'd bike as high into the mountains as my heavy one-speed would take me, then turn around and joyously coast downhill. I rarely spoke to a soul, except for the shopkeepers who supplied me with bread, cheese, and yogurt. But every day, with each pedal rotation, my inner pain receded. The gusts of an almost forgotten winter softened with each pedal forward into spring. The bicycle restored me to a point where I'd burst into song as I coasted along the deserted lanes.

I know I've driven many a roommate nuts with my desire to have my spokes and wheels close by. Jammed into cramped dorm rooms, cluttered apartments, and small offices, my bikes have never been far away. Recently, during one of my husband's cleaning spurts, I heard crashing in the garage and prepared myself for his annual question, "Do we really need all these bikes?" I sympathize with him, since the bikes have taken the place of his car in our garage. But I can't let go. Each of those bikes has a story.

I haven't had a good bike ride in a few years. My children are too young - they haven't found their balance yet - and I've been too tired and distracted to even pump air into the tires. But every day, as the nose of my minivan gently bumps against the bikes' protruding pedals, my 3-year-old asks whether he can ride "the big-boy bike" soon. He has mastered the tricycle, and senses that real adventure lurks close to the handlebars of those two-wheeled bikes. I know that before long, I'll watch him coast down our block and around the corner.    MM

Jocelyn Hale is a Minneapolis writer.