3. The Vagabond

Christopher leaned his bicycle against a tree and stood back to admire it. The new blue paint sparkled a bit in the sun. Metallic, his older sisters had called it. He thought it was pretty much the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He felt so grown up! And it was a ‘boys’ bike, you know, the kind with the metal bar straight across between the handlebars and the seat as opposed to the slanted bars on ‘girls’ bikes. He never could figure out what made that a ‘boy’ thing because as far as he could tell it only made falling more painful. Hey, why not crush your nuts on the way to planting your face in the ground? Double whammy!

He was also a bit proud of the fact that he was tall enough now to be able to stand on the ground with one leg on each side of the bike and NOT crush the nutbag! Good times!

A few years back Christopher had found a mail-in course on bicycle building/repair. He had always felt desire to study and learn and so with his mom’s permission had completed the entire course and now had the certificate hanging on his bedroom wall to prove it! So proud!

This bicycle was special. It had been a birthday gift from his parents for his 12th birthday. It was the first bike that Christopher could actually call his own. Till now he had had the choice of a series of hand-me-down bikes that were too small, pink or otherwise unfit for this almost young-man to ride. Or he could cobble together parts of old bikes littered around the farm to create some other form of ‘embarrassing-spectacle-on-wheels’. He had endured through those years and the reward was his own manly bicycle!

The word was casually splashed across the ball-squishing bar in a slanting eye-catching font. Christopher read it over and over. He liked the word. He had looked it up in the dictionary at school and it meant “a person who wanders from place to place without a fixed home”. He loved that definition.

The word called to him. He didn’t know why but he liked it. It felt like ‘his’ word. It whispered of travel, of adventure, of exploration. Mostly it pointed to life beyond the confines of the farm and THAT excited him the most.

Isn’t it interesting how little moments like that can stay in the mind and provide some direction or meaning to life later on? He would eventually come to understand this word VAGABOND better than he really wanted but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Right now it was time for this young vagabond to go have supper (his father insisted that the evening meal be called supper, “dinner is the noontime meal and supper is in the evening!! Jesus said so!” really important stuff) with his family.

The bishop was coming to visit tonight and that meant best behaviour! One must always impress the bishop! Christopher was pretty sure the black-suited, sad and somber old man wouldn’t be in favour of the whole vagabond thing so he put those thoughts into the back of his mind. He usually eavesdropped in on the conversations between his father and the bishop and planned to do so again tonight. He needed to learn all about how to ‘get saved’ from the horrid torture of those left behind after Jesus had done his appearing and disappearing act.

“ha I’m thinking about it so Jesus you can’t come right now!”

Apparently there were somethings more important than a bicycle.

Originally published at http://benjiesblog.org on November 8, 2020.