He leaned over and said to Alex: “Baby girl, are you nervous?”

She shook her head no.

He righted himself and said, “We’ve gone up and down the block, but now I’m thinking that she probably does better with someone else teaching this. My wife is against it. She said we can still teach her to ride a bike, but look, I just want to see what I get out of it.”

Burrel, still wiping the sweat off his head from the previous lesson, nodded. He’s been told something similar dozens of times, from parents across the South Side and, increasingly, the suburbs and the North Side, where the Legend of the Bike Whisperer has spread. He stepped in front of Alex’s bike and crouched down.

“I am Coach Louie,” he explained. “You are here to ride without training wheels.” Alex nodded. “Good, for your lesson, I have two rules for me, three rules for you. Your rules: No. 1, keep your hands on the handlebars. No. 2, keep your feet on the pedals. And No. 3, look forward so you can see where we are going. Now my rules: No. 1, I can’t let you crash into anything, no matter what. And No. 2, I can not let you fall. You follow your rules and I’ll follow mine. Alex, can I get a high-five from you?”

Alex obliged.

“You broke my rule!” Burrel said in mock outrage. “Hands on the handlebars!”

They started off slow, Burrel’s right arm on Alex’s right shoulder. Her father watched and turned to me and, thinking out loud, said: “I don’t want her little brother to learn before her. It’s not the end of the world — right? Some of this stuff we hold on just needs to go.”

Burrel, in a way, is paid for his patience. He charges less than $40 for a half-hour lesson, and he earns it. When I tried teaching my daughter a couple of years ago to ride a bike, I would have paid double. Riding a bike is a skill that tends to click and stay clicked so tightly you forget there was a time when you couldn’t do it. When I asked friends and several parents who hired Burrel how they learned to ride a bike, it was striking how many could not remember. They fell, they all recalled. Then one day, they could ride. You tend to gloss over the hows and whos.

Burrel, though, sees the unformed clay. He takes kids who are scared of pedals, scared of balancing, scared of brakes, but he also gets kids so eager to start riding they take off without him. He’s always surprised how many don’t need his steadying hand within 10 minutes of the first lesson. But the names, the kids, the lessons, it blurs. There are only so many Aidens and Calebs one man can teach before everyone is an Aiden or Caleb.

...continued

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