The worst part of moving away at age 8 was saying goodbye to Patricia Wood.
It was a Saturday morning in Englishtown, New Jersey, about one hour before we left forever for Illinois. Patricia was hugging me goodbye. Her mom had errands to run; we would be gone by the time they got back.
My bike had not yet been packed. I grabbed it as they got into their car. Riding behind them, I could see Patricia’s round face in the back window. I had the unbelievably painful urge to impress her one last time, so much that she’d never forget me.
Now, in our neighborhood, in the 70s, the curbs were not cut for wheelchair access. To get from the street onto the sidewalk on your bike, you had to stop, lift your front wheel, roll forward, lift your back wheel, roll forward, and get on. Unless you were excellent. In that case you simply jumped the curb, and kept on going. As for Robroy, earlier that very morning, for the very first time, I had become excellent. Patricia did not know that yet.
Her face was getting smaller. It was now or never. Do or die. At top speed, I hit the curb.
“Yah!”
The last she ever saw of me was flying head-first over the handlebars and onto the sidewalk. I smacked the ground and rolled over with the bike crashing down on top of me.
By the time I looked up, she was gone.
The memory comes back to me now. Robroy is moving again. No big deal this time. It’s just the blog that’s moving. We’re saying goodbye to WordPress and saying hello to our own domain, robroysblog.com. That’s all.
But deep down, I’m nervous. I worry. What if I leave my readers behind? What if I try too hard to impress them, and end up making a gigantic fool of myself? What if they get home and find no Robroy, only a ghost town, a wasteland of words?
I’ll be honest. I don’t want to lose another friend. Too painful on the knees.
Possibly Related Posts:
Every time I drive by, I get a kick out of the corner drug store in my neighborhood in Northeast Baltimore City. I love how they’ve adopted a marketing stunt from auto repair shops of the 1950s. Not a car but a motorized wheelchair sits on the roof of Northern Pharmacy. It’s as though some hotrod granny overshot the parking lot, climbed down, did her shopping, and forgot where she’d parked.
