Look Ma! No hands!

It is 1966. The construction project that has extended the road I live on is underway. There will be twenty house on this road, a cul-de-sac about two hundred yards long. The road came before the houses. It begins on the other side of a longer road running perpendicularly through it and is wider than mine. There were no houses on either side of the longer road until the 1950s. My parents were early settlers there, among the first. Our house was built in 1956. This new road is wider than mine and has a slight grade, rising from the road that bisects it and my side of it. We children find it an ideal place for bicycling on weekends after the construction crews have gone home. Smooth, no cars, and the cul-de-sac ends on a curve shielded by trees, hidden from parental view. Not that anyone was doing anything bad.
I was eight and late to learn how to bicycle. My brother, Sam, was ten. Having mastered standard bicycling, he and other kids his age are learning to ride with no hands. This starts with doing it while coasting; pedaling comes later. It's something that I and my asymmetrical body never master, but Sam is good at it. 
He's so good that he wants to show off his new skill to our mother, who is thirty-five years old. She and I get in the car, a black Dodge, and drive to the end of the cul-de-sac.

Sam—Sammy—begins the ride to the end. He pedals up to speed, then coasts, then takes his hands off the handlebars. And then, the showstopper: He puts his hands on his hips. This says, I am a cool boy, so skilled at this that I can strike this adult pose casually; riding with no hands is as natural to me as standing around like a grownup. I am a special boy. 
Our mother smiles broadly as she watches her second of three sons do this. At the time, I take this as a sign of how impressed she is with his new ability, happy that he's achieved it. I don't understand that it's more about how cute he is.
When I worked at an art museum store, I sold a mug to a boy around nine who was buying it for his mother. It occurred to me what a remarkable thing it must be to have this thing that came out of you covered with slime and blood grow into a person capable of washing, dressing, and feeding himself and then looking at an array of items and deciding which of them would be something you would like. That boy is a man in his mid twenties now. I hope his mother was able to appreciate such things and not weighed down and distracted by too many of the obligations that fill our days.