After I watched this Ted Talk, I knew I had to find a way to do something like what it talked about with my Grandma Virgie. She can’t walk very far, so she’s limited to wherever family like my mom, aunt, uncle, or cousin can take her in a car. My grandma gave up driving when she was 95, and with it went her last bit of personal mobility. People like my grandma increasingly find themselves with fewer options for exploration and less mobility as they age. Eventually, Ole turned this side project into an organization called Cycling Without Age, with chapters all over the world doing the same thing. A man named Ole, a bike enthusiast in Copenhagen, had started taking folks from nursing homes and giving them a chance to be mobile again with rickshaw rides. So how, at the youthful age of 96, did I manage to get my Grandma Virgie to step back onto a bicycle for the first time since WWII?Ī few years back, I stumbled onto this TEDx Talk: Cycling Without Age, and I was struck by the simple and yet profound message it contained. She prefers dessert, and she is one of the easiest-going and most non-fussy people I know, regardless of age. To this day, she’s the most dominant Scrabble player I have ever played with, including playing against English/Lit majors in college. She’s always been a sharp lady and was great at balancing playtime with focus and study. She became a Rosie the Riveter, working on airplanes during World War II alongside thousands of other women employed in factories to support the wartime effort.īy the time I was born, my grandma’s resume had shifted from building airplanes to baking delicious cookies, giving lots of hugs, and making sure I kept up with my French horn practice. She moved out to California when she was 18, following in the footsteps of her older sister. She is one of eight kids who grew up on a farm in a town that has hovered around a population of 1,000 people for the last hundred years. My grandma was born in 1924 in the rural town of Panora, Iowa toward the end of the Greatest Generation. For those who aren’t quick with mental math, that was 79 years ago. That’s the year that my Grandma Virgie estimates was the last time she rode a bicycle.

If my grandmother had wheels