Three Generations of Homemade Adventures

Some of the best childhood memories aren’t bought in stores. They are homemade—built from imagination, a little mischief, and the freedom to explore. In our family, those memories often began with a bicycle and something someone else had thrown away.

My love of bicycles began long before my boys discovered the freedom of riding on two wheels. While we were living in England, my daddy rescued an old bicycle from a junkyard and restored it for me. Daddy was a fix-it man, always able to see possibilities in things other people had given up on. What someone else had discarded became my very first bicycle and the beginning of a lifelong love of riding.

Years later, when we lived in Hampton, Virginia, my bicycle carried me on countless adventures. My parents and I spent many evenings pedaling through the streets and neighborhoods together. We rode what seemed like a million miles. I couldn’t tell you how far we actually went, but I remember the pleasure of being together, the turning pedals, and the feeling that there was always something else to discover around the next corner.

Eventually, those family rides led to adventures of my own.

I must have been about eleven when my parents began allowing me to ride from our home to the nearby military base, a trip of approximately two miles. There was swimming and bowling to look forward to, and I was delighted to have the freedom to go without my parents accompanying me.

Well, almost on my own.

My little brother, who was only six, often came along in an attached baby seat on the back of my bicycle. Imagine an eleven-year-old girl pedaling through Hampton with her six-year-old brother perched behind her!

Our route took us down North King Street and across the King Street Bridge, riding along the narrow sidewalk with cars zooming by just a few inches away. Looking back, I can hardly believe my parents allowed us to make that journey. Getting myself across the bridge was one thing. Doing it with my little brother riding on the back was another.

At the time, I don’t remember thinking about what might go wrong. I was thinking about swimming or bowling and the satisfaction of getting there under my own power. My brother was along for the adventure, and we had a whole day to enjoy.

I wonder now whether my parents worried as we pedaled away. Did they watch us disappear down the street and hope we would return safely? I never thought to ask them then. I was too busy enjoying the independence they had given me.

There were smaller adventures, too. One of my favorite destinations was a shopping center where I could buy éclairs from my favorite donut shop. Those cream-filled pastries were worth every turn of the pedals.

There was something especially satisfying about making that trip by myself. I could decide when to go, enjoy my treat, and pedal home feeling as though I had accomplished something important. I didn’t recognize it then, but those simple outings were helping me become more confident and independent.

Years afterward, my boys, Dustin and Jarred, found that same freedom.

They were always active and happiest outdoors. When Dustin was nine and Jarred was seven, some of their favorite adventures began at their grandparents’ home in Jourdanton, Texas. The house sat on Elm Street, plain and unpretentious, but to two boys with dirt on their knees and daylight burning in their pockets, it was a kingdom.

Between 1995 and 2001, my adoptive mother, Barbara Jeane Crawford Meyer—Grandma to Dustin and Jarred—lovingly cared for them after school and whenever my job required me to travel. My parents’ house became their home away from home, a familiar place where breakfast waited in the kitchen and adventure waited just beyond the screen door.

Grandma didn’t fill their days with expensive toys or carefully planned entertainment. She gave them something better: room to roam, Grandpa’s collection of junk to investigate, and enough freedom to turn an ordinary afternoon into something worth remembering.

Mornings at Grandma’s had their own rhythm. The percolator rattled on the stove, and cigarette smoke curled from a glass ashtray on the  table, drifting past the window blinds. In her housecoat and slippers, with her coffee close by, she made pigs in a blanket for breakfast.

She popped open a can of biscuits, flattened each one with her palm, wrapped it around a little smoked sausage, and pinched the seam before setting it on a cookie sheet. The oven door squeaked, and soon the kitchen smelled of baking dough, salty sausage, coffee, and cigarettes. The boys ate their pigs in a blanket hot, their fingers shiny with grease.

Then the screen door banged shut like a starter pistol, and they were off.

Having learned to ride a year or two earlier, Dustin and Jarred had discovered that bicycles were much more than two wheels and a set of handlebars. They were tickets to independence.

I can still see Dustin, older and certain, pumping the pedals of a hand-me-down bicycle as though he were racing the Texas wind. Jarred pedaled just as eagerly to keep up, his laughter trailing behind. Gravel popped beneath their tires. Dust rose and clung to their socks. Heat shimmered over the grass while cicadas carried on from the mesquite trees.

Their bicycles weren’t new, but that hardly mattered. They were explorers crossing unknown land and traveling across a dry, red planet called Jourdanton.

What I didn’t know then—and learned only years later—was how far their exploring took them. Apparently, their idea of a little ride around the neighborhood was quite different from mine.

Dustin and Jarred have since told me about riding more than a mile from their grandparents’ house, heading north of town along Brown Avenue. Those journeys included crossing busy Highway 97. Even now, the thought of my nine- and seven-year-old boys taking their bicycles across that highway makes my heart skip a beat.

I can only imagine what I would have said had I known. To them, it was simply part of the adventure. To their mother, hearing about it years afterward, it was a reason to be grateful that the story could be told with everyone safely grown.

And then I remember an eleven-year-old girl crossing the King Street Bridge with her little brother on the back of her bicycle. Perhaps my boys came by their adventurous ideas more honestly than I care to admit.

Daddy’s talent for fixing things came with a backyard full of junk he might need someday: scrap lumber, old parts, and an assortment of objects whose usefulness wasn’t always obvious to anyone but him. Dustin and Jarred saw that collection differently. To them, Grandpa’s backyard held everything they needed to create their own adventures.

They gathered pieces of scrap wood and hauled them to the post office parking lot, where they and their friends built ramps for their bicycles. There were no store-bought kits, no instructions, and certainly no professional supervision—just leftover lumber and a group of boys determined to see how high they could jump.

I never saw those ramps, so I can only imagine their construction. I suspect my opinion of their sturdiness would have differed considerably from theirs. But to Dustin, Jarred, and their friends, they were probably masterpieces. They had sorted through Grandpa’s junk, worked out a design, and built something they could use.

Looking back, I see the connection to that old bicycle Daddy brought home from the junkyard in England. He had turned something discarded into a gift for me. Years later, his grandsons were finding their own possibilities in the scraps he kept. Across three generations, we were discovering how much enjoyment could begin with something old and a willingness to make it useful again.

When the boys weren’t riding, there was still plenty to do. Scrap lumber became ramps, and cinder blocks and plywood became jumps. Cardboard boxes became castles. Sheets dragged from the house and draped over the clothesline became tents and forts, held in place with rocks, rope, and stubborn determination.

They dug holes to see what was underneath and caught grasshoppers to use for bait. Even the sprinkler became part of a game, with the boys darting through the spray, trying to dodge the water, and laughing when they got soaked anyway. Their entertainment came from their hands, their imaginations, and whatever they could find in the yard.

Sometimes Grandma watched from the porch, a glass of sun tea sweating beside her. When she called them in for lunch, they arrived loud, rowdy and very little inclination to stay indoors. They ate, then disappeared again with another bang of the screen door.

They tracked in mud and grass and occasionally tried to bring their outdoor discoveries into the house. Grandma had a clear opinion about where those things belonged.

“Get that shit outside before I spank your ass!”

There was no mistaking what she meant. Back outside they went, taking their treasures and their commotion with them.

That, too, was part of being at Grandma’s. She loved those boys, but loving them didn’t mean letting everything they found in the yard come through her kitchen.

By evening, the sun had dropped low, but the Texas heat still hung in the yard. The air smelled of dry grass and damp earth where the sprinkler had been running. Grandma would stand at the door and call their names. Dustin and Jarred came running, their hair damp with sweat, their shirts clinging to their backs, and both of them smelling like wet dog. They talked over each other, each determined to tell her about the day’s adventures first.

A few years later, we moved to an apartment complex in Pleasanton, Texas. A different address did nothing to diminish their resourcefulness. Once again, they found scraps of wood and other discarded junk and built a bicycle ramp. The apartment parking lot became the place to ride, practice jumps, and spend hours entertaining themselves.

I still smile at the nicknames they gave themselves. Dustin was “Man Bug,” and Jarred was “Pocket Change.” Those names fit the playful boys I remember, always ready to invent a game or find another use for something lying nearby.

From Grandpa’s backyard in Jourdanton to the apartment parking lot in Pleasanton, the setting changed, but the essential ingredients stayed the same: two bicycles, a few scraps of wood, an open space, and an afternoon ahead of them.

Those years between 1995 and 2001 are gone now. The bicycles rusted, the forts collapsed, the screen door was replaced, and the ashtray was put away. Dustin and Jarred grew into men with jobs, bills, and hard days of their own.

But when I listen to their stories, I hear the boys again. I hear their excitement over a ramp they built themselves, their laughter at something I was never supposed to know, and the easy certainty that Grandpa’s backyard held everything they needed.

I hope they can still hear the gravel beneath their tires and remember the Texas sun on their shoulders. I hope the smell of coffee or biscuits baking brings back Grandma’s kitchen. And I hope that somewhere beneath the noise of their grown-up lives, they can still hear her calling them home.

My daddy couldn’t have known, when he rescued that bicycle in England, that years later his grandsons would be digging through his backyard junk to build bicycle ramps. But when Dustin and Jarred tell those stories, I recognize something familiar: the satisfaction of making something yourself and the freedom to see where it might take you.

An old bicycle. A handful of lumber. Two boys who could make an afternoon’s entertainment out of almost anything.

The ramps are long gone, but the stories remain—homemade, just like the adventures themselves, stitched together from imagination, mischief, freedom, and a family’s love. 

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All primary source information referenced was obtained from a variety of published and archival materials, including books, historic newspapers, U.S. census records, vital records, probate files, and land documents. These sources were accessed through leading genealogical platforms such as Newspapers.com, Ancestry, FamilySearch, Find a Grave, as well as through local, state & federal archival repositories, libraries and private collections. Interpretive narrative may also include Carol Anna Meyer Brooks' personal experiences or family stories shared with her throughout her lifetime.

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