I’m willing to wager that you remember your first bike. As a parent, you remember giving it, watching your child light up with absolute pleasure.

I remember my first real bike as a young teen, a three-speed Schwinn that my Mom walked home from work, since she did not yet have a car. I watched her approach down Rolfe Street and almost couldn’t believe it. It was my birthday, so I knew the bike was for me. Gears. Brakes mounted on the head set. Something that would take me anywhere I wanted to go. No gas needed.

That was back in 1967, when I was in seventh grade. I’m 64 now, and I have not lost my child’s delight with the bike. The love affair with freewheeling, with friends in the “skid kid club” – no engines needed just pure legs and high spirits. Probably I am not alone. The one “toy” that everyone wanted, perhaps the one toy everyone got, was a bike. Learning to ride was a life skill. Like climbing a tree or hitting a ball or licking the batter off the spoon.

Why is it then that that universal attachment to the bike is becoming such a dangerous one? I can’t seem to square that simple and widespread idea of riding a bike with the fatalities mounting up when motorists clash with cyclists. Too many people are dying in our community. It concerns all of us. We are in this together. We can do better. As citizens. As patriots of a privileged nation who still take pride in our roads and the people who built them. There is a place for speed. There is a place for caution and awareness. We aren’t perfect. Accidents happen. But let’s do better. Let’s keep our eyes on the road and our hands upon the wheel, as Jim Morrison advised. No one makes it out alive, but no one should be cut down enjoying something we all learned to do as kids. For pleasure. For the fun of flying. For transportation that works nine times out of 10. No gas needed.

Let’s do this together. Let’s share the road. I’m not writing this to lecture or to make people feel bad. I’m writing so that Patrick Bettens’s death (Monitor front page, Sept. 7) can maybe mean something larger than a memorial with friends. He was my friend. He’d want us to drive as if our kids lived here.

(Kathy Mathis, a spin instructor at the YMCA, lives in Boscawen.)