Ghost Rider

It wasn't my bike that suffered the worst abuse. That was saved for the one owned by my little brother. That was the pecking order of things: If there was science to be done, it would be done at the expense of items belonging to my younger brother. In this case, it was the repeated experiment of pedaling a bicycle at a high rate of speed in the direction of the end of our street, and then hopping off. The momentum of all that pedaling would send the two-wheeled projectile in a more or less straight line until gravity caught up with it. Then it would tip over onto the ground, which brought us running after to pick it up for yet another run.
When I say "we," I mean my friends and I. My younger brother was the voice crying out in the wilderness for us to spare his bike the indignity and damage caused by such unmanned flights. We didn't heed his protestations. We kept launching it in hopes of catching a glimpse of something truly spectacular. For instance, every so often, the front wheel would hit a rock or a curb and the bike would rear up on top of itself. This was worth at least another half dozen attempts to recreate that scene.
And all the while, we ignored the pleas from the kid whose only mode of transportation was being recklessly pushed toward being less than useful. We called this game, long before Marvel Comics or Nicolas Cage jumped into the fray, "Ghost Rider." It got to the point where all we had to do was say those words in front of my brother to get a rise out of him. It should be noted that I maintain a certain degree of shame for this behavior as an adult, knowing that I was gifted with a sibling who was ultimately very patient and trusting, who was not a tattletale. Somehow, the spell of hanging out with the big kids was enough to keep him from running inside and bringing our mother out to tell us to knock it off.
The price he had to pay for his association with his older brother and his idjit friends? Surrender all hopes of maintaining his things in the manner he might have planned. I had a sense of this from my own interactions with my older brother, who taunted me as mercilessly at times, but I was all too ready to rat him and his buddies out if I ever got too uncomfortable.
So this comes as a much too late apology for any and all physical and emotional damage I may have caused my little brother who provided us with seemingly endless hours of fun, crashing his riderless bike into the curb.
It was pretty cool though.