Stubborn Father's Day

I thought a ride with my daughter would be a great Father's Day gift for
me, so I suggested it to her the day before.

"Where do you want to go?" she asked, and I said we might head up to
Lake Forest and I could show her where the Skokie Valley Trail hooked up
off Lake Cook Road. "Sounds great," she indicated.

The next morning, she wasn't up at 7. Or 8. Or ... well, let's just say
she rolled out of bed at 12:30 and announced that it was so hot last
night that she hadn't slept at all and we'd have to bag the ride.

"If we'd left at a reasonable hour, we'd be back by now," I complained.
"If you didn't want to go on the ride, you should have said that
yesterday!"

"Oh, all right. I'll GO on the ride. Let me get my stuff on," she
yelled. I regretted pushing it this far. There's nothing like a ride
with a sullen riding partner to make riding solo look good.

But, a few minutes later, we left.

Two blocks from home I was going to ride up on the sidewalk to push the
pedestrian button, but I took the low, wet curb at too acute an angle
and went sprawling. My knee hurt. There was a bleeding cut on my left
shin that looked exactly like the imprint of a pedal. My daughter said,
"Now I know why you told me I should get bicycling gloves."  I resolved
to ride through the pain.

At 4.3 miles in, I hear labored breathing from behind me and a strangled
"Dad!"  My daughter was having a panic attack. After that subsided, I
asked her if she wanted me to call Mom to pick us up, wanted to turn
back, or wanted to continue. "Let's keep going," she said. She's
stubborn -- must get that from her mother.

It started to rain. We ignored it.

After we left the garden and headed up the Skokie Valley Trail, it was
pretty clear we were out there alone so we rode side by side. My riding
partner is young enough to be my daughter and isn't carrying an extra 30
pounds around her middle, so she pressed the pace enough for me to be
slightly winded while she breathed easily.

We started to mellow. We had a nice snack at Einstein's in Lake Forest
and had a mellow ride home. Total miles: 43

It was a great Father's Day. I attempted to draw some sort of moral
about this in the evening, about how we might have arguments about
various aspects of her late adolescence but that if we just kept going
through them we'd come through this OK. She'd already forgotten about the
argument, the crash, the panic attack and the rain and
remembered only how nice a ride it had been. It was a great Father's
Day.