Bicycle Birthday Quotes

On my tenth birthday a bicycle and an atlas coincided as gifts, and a few days later I decided to cycle to India...However, I was a cunning child so I kept my ambition to myself, thus avoiding the tolerant amusement it would have provoked among my elders.

Be helpful after you think, be smart before you create your own personality and be thoughtful after making friends.

Stuart Diver has had years of extensive professional counselling to retrain his brain so that he can replace the thought of how helpless he was when Sally dies with the truth that he tried everything he could to save her, showing how much he cared. He has learned to substitute memories of Sally's last moments with thoughts of wonderful times from their lives together- a great trip, a fun birthday, some other special occasion. In the corner of his living room is a bicycle that he rides every night, and he likens keeping his mental health on track to keeping physically fit. It's hard. It requires patience and it takes discipline.

Toren can't make me feel that way. He's old. Okay, not old, but way older than me. He's practically family. He freakin' babysat me. He's been to all my birthday parties and all my school events. He's taken care of me when I was sick. He taught me how to ride a bicycle. He held me when I cried for my mom. He knows all my secrets and dreams. He's... ... everything.

It’s the same everywhere, she thought, they’re small and they live with you and you’re in love with them and they move away and a slightly bigger version of them moves in. Then you fall in love again, only to watch that little person leave, and yet a slightly taller, more agile version, who still fits in the toddler bed, but just barely, arrives and there you go again, head over heels. Another birthday will come and this one, too, will go, pigtails and all, and so on, until your heart could burst. You see them turn two, then three and four and you miss that tiny newborn who smelled like milk, the one-year-old who teeter-tottered, and how sweet was that two-year-old who would not let go of your hand, and do you remember running alongside her bicycle at five? Where did she go? Noor

Florrie studies him. From her lower viewpoint, she sees his pores and wrinkles, and a thumbprint on one of his lenses. There is, too, a nick of a razor near his bottom lip- and it reminds her once more that this elderly gent is still a boy, in some ways, as she is still a girl, fashioning a trumpet out of a rolled-up newspaper or chasing Bobs down the garden. She’s still blowing out ten birthday candles. We don’t leave the children we were. We simply grow around them like a tree will, in the end, grow around a bicycle that’s been left against them.

In last month’s photo, a front tooth dangled over her bottom lip and Iris laughed out loud, wanting to reach into the picture and yank the loose tooth from her daughter’s mouth. She wondered about the conversations she missed with the child—the fights they must have had over Melody’s need to keep that tooth a day, a week, a month, longer. Why hadn’t Aubrey snuck into her room in the middle of the night and yanked it the way her own father had done—Iris waking in the morning with that new space in her mouth and a crisp dollar bill beneath her pillow. But now the tooth was gone. Had Melody gotten a dollar for it too? Iris studied the space—the pink half circle of gum beside a tiny front tooth that hung at a slight angle as though it too was loose now. Iris shivered. Ran her tongue along her own straight teeth. She had missed the child’s birthday but had called, only to have Melody say, It’s my birthday and it’s party day. Bye! Daddy got me a bicycle. Bye again. And when she reminded the child that the bicycle was from both of them, Melody said, But Daddy put it together. And Daddy’s gonna teach me to ride. Always the phone calls were Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, and TV shows she’d watched. When she tried to ask Melody what she was reading, the child laughed. Everything, she said. I read everything. Now, staring at the picture of her daughter, she remembered again how her own mother had said more than once that there was nothing at all maternal about Iris and wondered if the maternal gene kicked in later. Iris wondered if it would happen in her twenties or thirties. And if it did, would she want more children?

But in 1964, when he was working as a shipping agent in Ouistreham for a British steamship line, Pickersgill met John Thornton, who introduced him to his wife, Jacqueline. Her maiden name was Noel; she had met Thornton on D plus four; they fell in love and married after the war; he too worked as a shipping agent in Ouistreham. It was Jacqueline who had been on the beach, and the story was true.10 Pickersgill arranged an interview for me with Jacqueline for this book. “Well,” she said, “I was on the beach for a silly reason. My twin sister had been killed in an air raid a fortnight before in Caen, and she had given me a bathing costume for my birthday, and I had left it on the beach, because we were allowed about once a week to remove the fences so we could pass to go swimming, and I had left the costume in a small hut on the beach, and I just wanted to go and pick it up. I didn’t want anybody to take it. “So I got on my bicycle and rode to the beach.” I asked, “Didn’t the Germans try to stop you?” “No, my Red Cross armband evidently made them think it was OK.” “There was quite a bit of activity,” she went on in a grand understatement, “and I saw a few dead bodies. And of course once I got to the beach I couldn’t go back, the English wouldn’t let me. They were whistling at me, you know. But mostly they were surprised to see me. I mean, it was a ridiculous thing to do. So I stayed on the beach to help with the wounded. I didn’t go back to the house until two days after. There was a lot to do.” She changed bandages, helped haul wounded and dead out of the water, and otherwise made herself useful.