When I was a little girl, I had a bike.

It was purple, my favorite color. It had a white basket on the front with three plastic daisies on it -- one red, one yellow, and one blue. The seat was a long white banana style one with a pink stripe down the middle, and the handlebars curved like the ones you would see on a Harley-Davidson Road Hog. Each handle had bright, colorful streamers shooting out of it like plastic fireworks. Sometimes I would put a Barbie in the basket, or a book, or some other random trinket, and ride in circles around my block. There were no training wheels on this bike -- I'd outgrown that a long time before.

I had a lot of toys growing up in those days before every toy you could buy required either a pack of AA batteries, an electrical outlet, and/or a USB port. I had baby dolls, and Barbie dolls, books, dress-up clothes, and even a play kitchen; I was a pretty lucky kid.

But the bike was special.

It wasn't because it was the largest toy, or the most expensive, or because it was purple with streamers and a banana seat, although these were all very marketable features. What made it special was that getting on it and racing around my block required a certain sense of bravery on my part. There was some level of primal risk involved in using it, and risk felt grown-up. As a kid, I was always looking for ways to feel grown-up, like when I was really young and used to sashay around in my mothers high heel boots, or when I used to pretend my black marker was one of those long Holly Golightly cigarette holders from Breakfast at Tiffany's. A bike was freedom, and with freedom came risk: you could fall and skid on the pavement and skin yourself up pretty bad or, worse, break a limb. You could take a wrong turn and get lost -- you could even die, under the most terrible set of circumstances. Of course, the notion of impending-doom-by-bicycle was really not all that impending, but it was the possibility that separated it in a thrilling way from, say, safer bets like playing Barbies on your front porch with the neighborhood girls with your mom close by in the kitchen.

Freedom with risk: in my childhood mind, this was everything it meant to be an adult. Parents always seem to want to postpone this experience for their child for a long as possible, to keep their child safe, but you get a little early taste of what that feels like on a bike. It's all you out there at the controls, by yourself, and there isn't anyone to catch you if you fall.

It doesn't get much more grown-up than that.

The world as I was familiar with it existed on Brace Street. Every other place that required travel by car -- school, dance classes, church -- felt distant and foreign. When you're a kid, any place you can't get to by yourself kind of feels that way. I navigated in and around my world in a racing purple blur with those streamers whipping along side me in the warm summer wind, the whirring of the crank in my ears as the pavement beneath me became an amalgamated swirl of concrete and grass. I knew where all the hazards were on my route, which was pretty much any house with a giant dog and a loose gate. I knew that pavement by heart -- where the old stuff was with the giant cracks where I had to slow it down, and when that ended, where it was new and smooth so I could really coast without concern. I would ride up Brace Street, across Kirkwood Ave., then back down Greenview Ave. over and over until I was too tired or homesick.

The first 12 houses on my block were all familiar to me, and I knew everyone that lived in them. Many of them were like family, and had short-syllable names that sounded with a tone of familiarity and comfort: Betty, Fred, Lisa, Terry, Kathy, Dave, Gina, Mike. I remember feeling that twinge of nerves when I was as far away from my house as I was allowed to be, and then that small decompressed relief the closer I would get back to my house again. Sometimes I would go in other directions, to other neighborhoods nearby, but that always felt just a little bit too far, too unfamiliar. When you're a kid, the fear of getting lost and not being able to go home is almost worse than death because, unlike death, that fear is fallible. In the first decade of my life, riding that bike became a very important part of my otherwise mundane, kid-growing-up-in-a-working-class-neighborhood existence. It was Huck Finn's raft, Fonzie's motorcycle, and She-Ra's magical pegasus, Swiftwind, all-in-one. (Yes, I just made a She-Ra reference. Suck it. It was my favorite cartoon at the time, ok?)

I spent the first decade of my life whizzing around this mostly friendly neighborhood on the west-side of Detroit in the early 1980s. I lived in a small two story bungalow with my mother, father, and new baby brother on the 5600 block of Brace Street, which is near the intersection of Ford Road and Telegraph, a hair's breath from the upscale neighborhood of Dearborn, but not quite inside of it.

Back when I lived there, Dearborn was mostly the upper-middle class neighborhood where white-collar businessmen working for The Big Three lived. (Today its known for having the second largest Arab population in the United States. The tensions between whites and Arabs were only starting to build when I lived in that vicinity, and I remember slurs being thrown around within our neighborhood frequently.)  Dearborn had the better schools, better shopping, and better everything pretty much. In my limited childhood understanding of class divisions, I knew that below the uppercrust City of Dearborn was Dearborn Heights (kind of odd, considering its name), and below that were those of us with a Detroit mailing address.

 I went to private school in Dearborn because my parents didn't trust the Detroit public school system with the early years of my childhood education. It was a large K-12 in a single building run by the Assembly of God church. In exchange for faking my way through the divine experience of being blessed with the gift of tongues in order to fit in as a first grader, I got to go to a school with actual playground equipment. I considered this a fairly even trade considering that Carver Elementary, where I would have gone, only had an open black-top lot, a tall, prison-like fence, and a couple of basketball poles with no nets. Still, as a traditional Weslyan, my mother wasn't too thrilled when she found out about the whole speaking in tounges bit. To me it was more a fun sort of linguistic experimentation, like Pig Latin or Esperanto, except supposedly only God knew what it meant. Pretty nifty.

Always class conscious, my mother would say things that didn't make sense to me as a kid like: "Honey, if anyone at school asks you where you're from, tell them you're from Dearborn Heights, ok?"
"Mmm. Ok."
I always wondered why she didn't just tell me to tell people I was from the City of Dearborn? I mean, if you're going to lie, you might as well go all the way. I did it anyway though because these kinds of things just were not as important to me as playground equipment.

In the summer of 1986, we moved. Everyone was moving it seemed. People -- those white, working class people I knew and grew up around -- were moving. Detroit's population was shrinking drastically, as its suburbs and outer-regions mushroomed. The issue was a complicated one, and it began almost a decade before I was born, and would continue for three decades after up to the present. Whatever the weighted implications of it, I was completely unaware as a child. The only thing I knew was a general sense of excitement over the fact that my life was about to change drastically for the very first time.

We moved to a town called Howell, a place I had never been before, about 45 miles west of Detroit, which, when you're a kid, might as well be in another country. Our new house was a modest three bedroom ranch, with an airy screened in porch and a big backyard. Our entire yard, front and back, was about twice the size of the small square we had in the city. We had all the yard space we wanted to play in, but house was on a very busy roadway and there were no sidewalks, so it was too dangerous for biking.

Not that there were any blocks to ride around anyway -- just a long, 55mph death gauntlet that went straight east and west.

A couple years after we moved, I got my first dog.  Whether it was a consolation prize from my parents for having no place to ride my bike anymore or just another fixture of the country life we were trying to create for ourselves I had no idea, but I absolutely loved him straight to my bones, parental rationale be damned.  He was a beautiful but pretty dumb and very slobbery golden retriever we named Gunner. It was a thrilling moment to say the least -- but the dog ran away one afternoon and was killed on that road. We didn't find out Gunner's fate until weeks later when a neighbor finally saw a sign and notified us that he had buried him in his own backyard after finding him by the roadside. I was devastated and grieved over him for nearly a year; I never forgave that road for it.

We didn't really know any of our neighbors like we did on Brace which, in later years,  I would come to appreciate as highly ironic. There were no Bettys, no Freds, no Terrys, no Cathys, no Mikes and no Daves or Ginas. Just an old lady across the street that I would catch glimpses of from time to time, a young married couple with no kids on one side of us, and another old couple we never knew at all on the other. There was a young girl near my age and her brother who lived in a house behind ours who I would occasionally visit, but she had a much older brother and he used to scare the shit out of me.  I sensed some sort of malice in him, even at my young age, so I stayed away mostly out of pure instinct. Other than that, most any friend I had whose house I wanted to visit required a car and a parent to drive it. I finally got my own car when my Dad gave me his old Ford Ranger when I turned 17. At that point, I was free to go anywhere in town I wanted.

In the back of my mind, I understood why my parents decided to move: they wanted to give my brother and myself a better life. They wanted us to grow up in a place that always felt safe, where we could just be kids and not have to worry about the kinds of problems that you have in a big, unstable city like Detroit. Besides, it wasn't like they hadn't made their own concessions in this move: both my parents were born in Detroit, they met there way back in elementary school, and eventually married and had their children there. It was their home too. Every change involves sacrifice.

Ultimately, they were right. Things did get better for me in time, but it was pretty rough going at first. Looking back now I realize I'm glad for the memories I have, and the friends I made along the way. I know that had we never moved, I wouldn't have them and my life would be very different.

Not better. Not worse. Just different. And I like the memories I have.

And as for the bike?

It stayed hung up in the garage until one day, after years of neglect, I finally gave it away.