Tricycle Dreams
By Ellen Notbohm
July 15, 2024
July 15, 2024
My grandmother Lillian arrived on the planet December 11, 1891 and must have liked a lot of what she saw, because she stuck around for ninety-six years. You’d never know it from my earliest photograph of her, though. An 1894 studio photo portrays a pretty but unsmiling toddler, seated just so in a flouncy dress and pantaloons, fist balled up in her lap, feet encased in three-button shoes planted firmly apart on the floor. There’s a nascent defiance there I never saw in my thirty years with her. Perhaps it was crushed along with her most dearly held childhood dream a few years later.
For the first of her ten decades, her father was a peddler, travelling from their Chicago home up into Wisconsin and Michigan. When he could no longer do that, Lil’s five older sisters and brothers left school one by one to support the family. “I alone graduated from high school,” she told us.
In a photo taken some years after the toddler portrait she stands, with only the barest trace of a smile, on a sidewalk on Chicago’s South Side. Dressed in dirty boots, rumpled skirt and jacket, and an oversized beret, her eyes tell me she’s holding something back. Sometime between those two photos occurred a moment that never left her: she asked a child’s heartfelt question and received a father’s offhand answer, two words he couldn’t have imagined would cut so deeply that his daughter would repeat them to her granddaughter eighty years later. And another four decades later, here I repeat them again.
She was seven years old. She saw a tricycle in the window of a store. She trembled with yearning. She returned to the window many times. With its dainty small wheel in front and two large wheels in the back, its black enamel framing gleaming against its plush seat and back, it was a veritable carriage for a little princess! She worked up the nerve to ask her father if she could have it for her next birthday. He said, “Oh, sure.”
She heard the words, not the inflection. Didn’t hear the sarcasm, the exhaustion, the utter impossibility of her request. Didn’t think of the eight mouths her father had to feed during a decade of depression that had encompassed her whole life, a decade fraught with unemployment, farm foreclosures and labor strikes put down by federal troops. Didn’t consider that two of her sisters also had birthdays, one day before and one day after hers. When the tricycle disappeared from the store window, what would a hopeful child assume but that her father had granted her wish? That she would throw open the door on December 11, and there on the sidewalk it would be?
The piercing disappointment of that morning lives on after more than a century.
Like many teenagers, I never thought beyond my grandparents being anything but old, the way they’d always been to me. Of course I knew better, but it took a story about a tricycle to force me to walk beside my grandmother, having to walk away from her child-heart’s desire.
“Grandma,” I blurted when, at ninety years old, she told me the story. “I will buy you the best tricycle there is—today.”
“You’re sweet,” she said, smiling at my preposterous offer. My prosperous grandfather had left her well off, even through a three-decade widowhood. She could have bought a fleet of three-wheelers long ago. But that afternoon in the light of her living room window, the wraith of wistfulness crossed her face. The tricycle, she mused, was her first lesson in how we sometimes must accept things we don’t understand.
Oh, sure.
Lil died several years before my preschool son became enchanted with a wordless book called The Remarkable Riderless Runaway Tricycle, the story of a boy’s beloved tricycle mistakenly picked up as trash and taken to the dump. Magically, it comes to life and pedals its way through across town, through danger and mayhem, making its way back to the boy.
At the time, my son spoke little. His dreams were unknowable to us. Like his great-grandmother, he was tone-deaf to sarcasm and improbability. He was also the devoted owner of a shiny red trike. For all he didn’t understand, he most certainly would have understood a girl who longed for the adventure of owning a three-wheeler and the thrill of seeing where it would take her.
If she had asked him for a turn on his marvelous tricycle, he would have said, “Oh, sure!” and waited with uncharacteristic patience while she, a different kind of “pedaler” than her father, pedaled and dreamed.
For the first of her ten decades, her father was a peddler, travelling from their Chicago home up into Wisconsin and Michigan. When he could no longer do that, Lil’s five older sisters and brothers left school one by one to support the family. “I alone graduated from high school,” she told us.
In a photo taken some years after the toddler portrait she stands, with only the barest trace of a smile, on a sidewalk on Chicago’s South Side. Dressed in dirty boots, rumpled skirt and jacket, and an oversized beret, her eyes tell me she’s holding something back. Sometime between those two photos occurred a moment that never left her: she asked a child’s heartfelt question and received a father’s offhand answer, two words he couldn’t have imagined would cut so deeply that his daughter would repeat them to her granddaughter eighty years later. And another four decades later, here I repeat them again.
She was seven years old. She saw a tricycle in the window of a store. She trembled with yearning. She returned to the window many times. With its dainty small wheel in front and two large wheels in the back, its black enamel framing gleaming against its plush seat and back, it was a veritable carriage for a little princess! She worked up the nerve to ask her father if she could have it for her next birthday. He said, “Oh, sure.”
She heard the words, not the inflection. Didn’t hear the sarcasm, the exhaustion, the utter impossibility of her request. Didn’t think of the eight mouths her father had to feed during a decade of depression that had encompassed her whole life, a decade fraught with unemployment, farm foreclosures and labor strikes put down by federal troops. Didn’t consider that two of her sisters also had birthdays, one day before and one day after hers. When the tricycle disappeared from the store window, what would a hopeful child assume but that her father had granted her wish? That she would throw open the door on December 11, and there on the sidewalk it would be?
The piercing disappointment of that morning lives on after more than a century.
Like many teenagers, I never thought beyond my grandparents being anything but old, the way they’d always been to me. Of course I knew better, but it took a story about a tricycle to force me to walk beside my grandmother, having to walk away from her child-heart’s desire.
“Grandma,” I blurted when, at ninety years old, she told me the story. “I will buy you the best tricycle there is—today.”
“You’re sweet,” she said, smiling at my preposterous offer. My prosperous grandfather had left her well off, even through a three-decade widowhood. She could have bought a fleet of three-wheelers long ago. But that afternoon in the light of her living room window, the wraith of wistfulness crossed her face. The tricycle, she mused, was her first lesson in how we sometimes must accept things we don’t understand.
Oh, sure.
Lil died several years before my preschool son became enchanted with a wordless book called The Remarkable Riderless Runaway Tricycle, the story of a boy’s beloved tricycle mistakenly picked up as trash and taken to the dump. Magically, it comes to life and pedals its way through across town, through danger and mayhem, making its way back to the boy.
At the time, my son spoke little. His dreams were unknowable to us. Like his great-grandmother, he was tone-deaf to sarcasm and improbability. He was also the devoted owner of a shiny red trike. For all he didn’t understand, he most certainly would have understood a girl who longed for the adventure of owning a three-wheeler and the thrill of seeing where it would take her.
If she had asked him for a turn on his marvelous tricycle, he would have said, “Oh, sure!” and waited with uncharacteristic patience while she, a different kind of “pedaler” than her father, pedaled and dreamed.
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Ellen Notbohm’s internationally renowned work has touched millions in more than twenty-five languages. She is author of the award-winning novel The River by Starlight and the nonfiction classic Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew. Her short prose and poetry has appeared in many literary journals, including Brevity, Eclectica, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Halfway Down the Stairs, Quail Bell, Eunoia Review, Does It Have Pockets?, Academy of the Heart and Mind, and in anthologies in the US and abroad.
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Author’s Note:
My grandmother lived thousands of miles from us, so our time together was largely limited to family events. We were never alone, just the two of us. She was a generous well-to-do widow and had something of a regal aura about her. So the brief private conversation wherein she blurted out this poignant story of vulnerability was startling in many ways. In just a few words, she filled in the whole scope of her life for me, from beginnings humbler than I’d known. I didn’t see the telling photos until many years later. While this story is my favorite memory of her, what has always struck me most is the connection it forged between her and my autistic son, born years after she passed: they were as different as chalk and cheese, but across more than a century, shared a timeless childhood dream.