The years were unkind to the Fast Trike, but they only ate it slowly.  It had belonged to my grandfather, and it struck me one day, while I was scrubbing off the rust, that it was about fifty-five years old, which is to say, not very much younger than I am.  It looked like the trikes that appear in the Dick and Jane books (you know the ones).  What that meant was that he bought the thing for his grandkids to use.  It lived in his garage but it formed a part of what we called his Grampie Closet, which was mostly a real closet off the dining room where we went to find his trove of toys.  I began stocking my own Grampie Closet when I reached a certain age.  It's for grandkids that I was scrubbing rust.

Today I took the Fast Trike to a shop called Rose Bicycle.  It had suffered a catastrophic failure of a hind wheel, under undue load.  The first shop I took it to, in a sad town across the river, could not, they said, repair it.  The man claimed he had no source for wheels which would attach as those wheels do.  I rather expected to hear something of the kind, ultimately, from Rose Bicycle, so I campaigned.

"This is the Fast Trike," I told the fellow.  "It got the name because of the big wheel in the front.  Most of these kid trikes, you can pedal 'til you're blue and they still just creep.  But once you learn how to sit this thing, how to lean into it, it really zips, and there's that platform in the back, sturdy enough so that a second kid can ride it.

"The Fast Trike is a real hit in my neighborhood, I can tell you.

"Now I grew up to expect things from a bicycle shop.  Look at the Wright brothers!  They invented flight, on the side, and they were running a bike shop."

The guy chuckled and said something self-deprecating, but I refused to let him off.

"You got into a profession with a rep."  He laughed again.  "Now, I know nobody will have the exact wheel for a fifty-year-old trike.  So it'll be both wheels, new, but consider:  they don't have to be spoked wheels; they could be intended for one of those wagons, or one of those wheelbarrow things for gardeners;  they don't even have to attach the way these do, the thing could be set up to accept a different sort of wheel.  Even the height of the wheels, you know, exactly, isn't particularly critical.  They are passive rollers, the ratio with the front wheel is irrelevant.  This is a bicycle shop, and I think you can make this happen.  When you do, we'll both be heroes."

He said Jim would be back Wednesday.  "Jim is more the Wright brothers type," he told me.

I had already read about Jim and his sense of the wrenching responsibilities involved in running a bike shop.  So I left them the Fast Trike, and I wait in hope.