The bicycle was older than me, older than my daughter, and, according to my father, “still younger than some of the grudges in Dublin.” It leaned for years against the back wall of his shed in Phibsborough, under a torn tarpaulin, with flat tyres and a basket that had gone soft with rust. I never liked it much when I was young. It was heavy, black, and too upright, the sort of bicycle that made you feel as if you were delivering bad news. My father rode it everywhere: to work near Capel Street, to Mass, to the shops, even once to collect me from a school disco when I was fifteen and mortified beyond speech.
After my mother died, my father stopped cycling. He stopped doing many things. He kept the radio on for company, but not loud enough to hear. He put the kettle on and forgot to pour the tea. When I visited, he would sit at the kitchen table and talk about weather that had already passed. I tried bringing dinners, new slippers, crossword books, but grief had made him polite and unreachable. Then, one Saturday, my daughter Lily, who was nine, wandered into the shed and asked if the old bicycle was a “museum thing.”
My father laughed for the first time in weeks. Not a big laugh, but enough to change the air. He stood slowly, followed her out, and brushed dust from the saddle with his sleeve. “That yoke carried your grandmother all the way to Phoenix Park the summer I met her,” he said. Lily looked at him as if he had just opened a secret door. “Granny was on that?” she asked. He nodded. “Side-saddle on the bar, bold as brass.”
I had never heard that story. My parents, to me, had always been parents: sensible shoes, bills, brown envelopes, quiet arguments in the hall. I had not imagined them young, flying down the North Circular Road with no helmets and no plans. My father told Lily that he had bought the bicycle second-hand from a man in Stoneybatter in 1968, paying for it in three instalments. He said my mother used to pretend she hated it, but she would still ask for spins along the canal when the evenings were long. He pointed at the bell, dull and stiff, and said she rang it at every dog they passed.
Lily decided there and then that we had to fix it. I said it was impossible, because adults say that when they are afraid of effort or hope. My father, surprisingly, said it only needed tyres, brake cables, oil, and “someone with patience, which rules out your mother.” Lily roared laughing. I should have been offended, but I was too relieved to see him teasing me again.
For the next month, every Wednesday after school, we went to his house. Lily sat on an upturned paint tin in the shed, passing him tools and asking questions. I made tea and pretended not to watch from the doorway. My father’s hands shook when he began, but less when he explained things. He showed her how to loosen a nut, how to patch a tube, how to polish chrome with foil. He told her about the Dublin he knew: dances near Drumcondra, chips after the pictures, rain on the way home from O’Connell Street. Sometimes he mentioned my mother as if she were in the next room, and sometimes his voice cracked and he looked away. Lily never rushed him. She would just hold the spanner out and wait.
One evening, I found them arguing gently over the basket. Lily wanted to paint it yellow. My father said your grandmother would haunt us if we made “a showband instrument” out of her bicycle. Lily asked what colour Granny liked. He went quiet, then said, “Blue. She had a blue dress I could see from the far end of a dance hall.” So they painted the basket blue. Not neat, not professional, but bright enough to look like a small piece of sky had been attached to the handlebars.
The first day we took it out, the city was shining after rain. We walked the bicycle to Blessington Street Basin because my father said he wasn’t having his comeback performance witnessed by half of Phibsborough. He wore his old cap and a scarf Lily had knitted badly, full of holes and pride. I held the saddle while he got on, and for a second I saw how frail he had become. His coat hung from him. His knees
Note: Please be aware that these are written in confidentiality and there is not reference or mention of any real people and their sentiments here. Every incident and Story tends to be emotional so please read at your own emotional risk. Website is not responsible for anything related. HumansofDublin.io is not related to the photography project HumansofDublin by Peter Varga
