A Bicycle Built for Two

In the middle of quarantine, biking kept my family sane

Ididn’t really plan to prop my son on the back of my bicycle. It just kind of happened.

“Hey, Papa,” said Leo, approaching the back of my Trek hybrid. “Can I get up there?”

At first I thought he meant the seat. He had climbed up before, leaning into the handlebars and squeezing the brakes as I held onto the frame. At six years old, he’s much too small to reach the pedals, so the position is a novelty, like putting him in the driver’s seat of our car.

But Leo didn’t mean the seat; he meant the luggage rack, a foot-long platform that hovers above my rear wheel.

“Well,” I hedged. “I’m not sure if, uh — ”

As usual, I couldn’t stop him. Leo lifted himself onto the rack and straddled it. He looked at me expectantly. His eyes said, Okay. Let’s go.

We were near the end of a bike ride through the East Side of Providence, on a fresh new trail that starts in India Point Park and skirts the Seekonk River. Leo had pushed himself down the trail on his “balance bike,” a model with no pedals that helps kids bypass training wheels. We’d gone a good distance — from India Point Park to Blackstone Park, to Wayland Square, and now to the trailhead near the Salvation Army. In a mile or so, we’d be back at the car…