Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me_ (And Other Concerns) - Mindy Kaling [6]
The strange thing is, I love watching certain sports as much as I detest participating in them myself. In the early 1980s, when my family was fixated on the Celtics-Lakers rivalry, I sat in front of the TV with them, thinking Larry Bird was the handsomest man in the world.* But if handed an actual basketball, I would instantly begin to cry. For me, doing sports was like meeting the Disney characters at Disney World. On TV I loved Mickey Mouse, but when I met the actual real-life Mickey, or rather, his impersonator, and he tried to hug me in his warm, fuzzy suit, I recoiled in fear.
PART ONE: BIKES
I learned to ride a bike at age twelve. That was crazy old for my neighborhood. I had been successfully avoiding learning for years, mostly by making a big show that I couldn’t be torn away from whatever book I was reading. If my parents have any soft spot, it is for books, and I knew that the best way to get out of chores, or sports, or talking to elderly relatives on the phone was by holding up a book and saying, “But I’m just enjoying Little House on the Prairie so much!” I may have read the entire Laura Ingalls Wilder canon simply to get out of raking the lawn with my brother. But when other girls in my grade were starting to get their periods and I still didn’t know how to ride a bike, the jig was glaringly up.
My dad finally had to get serious about this. Maybe he was worried I would go through life not participating in one of the Great American pastimes. Maybe he thought I had the potential to become a great cyclist. Or maybe he thought riding a bike would be a great way to flee assailants. Presumably he just wanted me to fit in with the kids who biked around, and to make some friends, and not be that strange girl who stayed in every weekend watching The Golden Girls with her mom.
Fueling my fight against my dad’s wishes was my enormous dislike of bikes. Bikes were horrible. Bikes always seemed to be scratching against my legs, or the spoke was poking me or something. Pebbles ended up in my ankle socks when I was on a bike. The seat felt sharp and hurt my crotch. The bike represented everything annoying and uncomfortable in my young life.
Wearing elbow pads, knee pads, and a helmet, I took my bike to the parking lot behind the Beth Shalom synagogue across the street. Dad came with me, holding two huge bottles of Gatorade. I was obsessed with not getting dehydrated while learning to ride a bike. It took me a week to find my balance, because once I took both feet off the ground, I employed the ace move of closing my eyes out of fear.
“What are you doing? Open your eyes!” my dad shouted.
So, it turns out that keeping your eyes open is the key to learning to ride a bike. Once I mastered balance, my dad left me alone to do bike drills so I’d have it ingrained. “Doing drills until it’s ingrained” is actually a classic Indian technique of teaching children things that goes back to Sanskrit liturgical texts. Index cards and Sharpie pens are actually distinctly Indian cultural artifacts to me. I rode my bike, for hours, around the parking lot behind Beth Shalom. Let me remind you that this was before iPods. This was even before those bright yellow sports Walkmans. With no music to listen to, I just biked around in circles talking to myself like a kid on the cover of a Robert Cormier young adult novel, circling around puzzled Jewish families walking back to their cars. This is how I learned to ride a bike.
What my dad didn’t realize at the time was that while I was cementing the mechanics of riding the bike, I was also cementing my hatred for doing it. I just decided I hated it, and that was that. You cannot begin to understand the power of my irrational hatred at twelve years old, but it’s the kind of hatred that lasts. It was the same mysterious and powerful hatred that reared its head later in life for other things, like hiking, orientation games, and having to watch any kind of pageant whatsoever.
PART TWO: FRISBEE
Even though I wisely chose a group of friends who weren’t too athletic, the Frisbee