Helmet on, eyes bright, smile wide.
Anna Keeler just rode a bicycle for the first time – and she’s 92.
“I didn’t fall, and I balanced it perfectly,” Keeler said proudly at her residential care home, Hilltop House, Friday afternoon. She added she felt, “pretty wonderful” riding the three-wheeled bike.
“The whole time all I could think of was when young kids learn to drive a bike, the parents let go after a while and [the kids] don’t know that they are driving their bike, finally.”
Riding the bicycle – which was actually a tricycle – was a dream come true for Keeler.
“My husband always said, ‘You could drive a three-wheeled bike,’” Keeler said.
Keeler’s husband of 72 years, Don, died in June, so getting Keeler out on a bike was a way to lift her spirits and show her there were still new things she could do, explained Keeler’s daughter-in-law, Anne Keeler, who works at Hilltop House.
The adventure was a community affair.
It all started when Laura Naro, a rehabilitation assistant at Hilltop, asked Keeler for her “bucket list” and then put a request out on social media to try to find a bike. Several people came forward with offers.
Anne picked up the three-wheeled, apple-red loaner trike last Sunday, and with many of Anna’s family there to watch, she was helped onto the bike, and then pedalled away down the street.
Anna and her husband came to B.C. from Nova Scotia in 1988.
Bicycles played a huge part in his life early in their marriage, she said, as they could not afford a car after the war, so Don commuted to work on a bike.
“We lived… on a hill, and I could look right across the lake and see him coming along on his bike… I always had the meal on time because I could see him coming along the road.”
But Anna had wanted to ride a bicycle too and she did try, both as a child and as an adult, but she just could not balance, she said.
She said she was afraid of bikes because at age nine, she had been hit by a rider while walking to school and spent six months in bed recovering from a broken leg.
Anna said she thought not learning to ride might have something to do with the fact she grew up with a sister and no brothers.
“I always wanted a brother, and I always wanted to drive a bike,” she said. “I had no brother to balance it for me.”
She made sure her children, five boys and one girl, all learned to ride bikes.
“My dad would tease me about that,” Anna said, “And he said ‘Now did you learn to ride the bike?’”
But she didn’t, until last Sunday.
“I would like people to know that it can be done, and they can get a three-wheeled bike now,” she said.
