teaching my daughter how to ride her bike...

I tried to teach my daughter how to ride her bike when she was 7. She is the kind of kid where, if something doesn't come to her, if something isn't easy immediately, she wants no part of it.
Riding a bicycle doesn't come immediately to most people and she had a lot of inner ear problems as a small child, so her balance was not what it needed to be. After an hour or so of difficult trying, she asked me kindly to shove the bike up my nose.
Now it's three years later and she still has training wheels on her bike.
The other 10 year olds aren't looking upon this with favor so she wants it resolved.
Over the course of the weekend just past, she and I resolved it. I am happy to report she can now ride with no wheels of training.
Working with her as hard as I did this weekend reminded me of how I was taught to ride a bike.
My Grandfather was the kind of guy who saw that I was going to have to start with a small bike and move progressively up to a larger bike. He knew this was going to happen and he figured, since I was going to get to an adult size bike eventually anyway, I might as well start with one.
Late spring of 1975. I was 7. He came home with a battleship-gray bicycle for me. I knew the gray that it was was battleship-gray because it was made out of an actual battleship. It had three-speeds and weighed 137 pounds. If I stood up on my tiptoes, I could almost touch the seat and there were no tubes in the wheels; they were solid rubber. Maybe they were solid rubber only most of the way through. Some of the wheel might have been cast iron. The ride was neither smooth nor safe-feeling.
I know because I rode it. It was my bike for a long time. Years.
I learned to ride it, like this...
My Grandfather and my Dad put me on this massive bike at the top of a grassy hill and pushed. It was either learn how to ride the bike, or die.
Later, when I had learned to ride the bike and was proficient at it, I almost did die.
A large puddle would freeze outside of my Grandparent's house. The bigger kids in the neighborhood, on their sleek BMX-y bikes would tear ass down the street and hit their breaks just as they got onto the ice, then sliiiiiiiiiide all the way across. It was pretty neat.
Me and the leaden monster wanted a turn. I went around the block a couple of times to build up the appropriate speed, targeted the ice, connected, hit my breaks and SLAM!! The wheels instantly went out from under my ass and the back of my head came down on the ice at MACH 7.
I was out. Cold. Gone. I guess one of the kids ran and got my Grandparents. I woke up in the bathtub, fully clothed. They were speaking soothingly to me and splashing my face with warm water. If the kids had just bolted and left me there, I might have been worse off.
But I'm no doctor.