Childhood Memories on Wheels

The three years from grade 2nd to grade 5th of elementary is a paradise in my memory. And the memory of sitting on the front bar of my dad's bicycle every day at that time is one of my best childhood memories.

I was naughty and never concentrated in classes, and my liberal dad didn't like ordinary elementary school education that he helped me leave school with the excuse of being sick, so I could develop myself freely. We lived in the yard of the elementary school, while my dad worked in middle school. He rode a bicycle to the middle school every day. He took me there and left me at his dormitory in the middle school. My brother studied in that middle school at that time. So usually in the morning, my brother sat in the back seat, and I was on the front bar on my dad's bicycle. Luckily there were no police to take care of this at that time.

Our town was so small that the distance from the elementary school to the middle school was not so far. It just needed to cross a bridge, bypass a street park, and go along several streets. The total took no more than twenty minutes. My brother usually walked home by himself in the evening, and my dad only took me home with his bicycle. I still sat on the front bar. It was no hurry so when dad was riding the bicycle, he talked to me about philosophy or literature. People came and went on the streets with the noisy voices and the shouts of the sellers. All these were no longer in my eyes and ears. The cement pavement under the wheels flowed forward, with water-like lines.

While the wheels were rolling, I heard my dad talking about Lu You's "Ode to the Plum Blossom (to the tune of Bu Suan Zi). That was my first time touching the ci poems, the first time I knew that ancient poems could be composed of sentences of different lengths, and could be so beautiful:

Her petals were ground in the mud,

Only her fragrance was there, as before.

I was intoxicated in the air, the road ahead turned into a rain of petals.

When I got home, my desire to be creative was high. Without knowing that there was a fixed format for "ci poems", I wrote the first one I had thought was a "ci poem" for night lilac.

My first impression of philosophy came from "Negation of the negation", which was learned on the way home on the wheels, too. "The seeds were negated by the seedlings, and later the seedlings were negated by the flowering plants, which were negated by seeds again. While the later seeds were not the same as the previous one." It was so novel for me that I know how to see the world and things with such an angle and method for the first time. The cement road changed from a pile of seeds to seedlings, flowering, turned into seeds, changed to the green field of seedlings, and so on and so forth until home.

Sometimes the wheels stopped halfway, which was a sweet taste with a little secret. My dad went to the small grocery store on the street for some snacks like candies. He shared with me and asked me "do not tell mom". Of course, the wheels also stopped at the post office, bookstore, or the stores where my dad bought something according to mom's request.

The rolling wheels just walked through spring and autumn, also with the freshness of early summer and coldness of winter. When it rained, we had to take an umbrella. Fortunately, we didn't need shade cause the wheels ran in the morning and evening.

During the summer holiday of the year when I graded up to middle school, our whole family moved to live in the middle school so I rarely had a ride with my dad's bicycle anymore. But I always remember the license plate of that bicycle, which was called "Yong Jiu", a meaning “Forever”.