When trying to be understood by those who might not speak my language, I’ve found it helpful to talk very loudly. It was for that reason that I yelled at the two Hispanic children I encountered while bicycling through northern New Mexico.

My mate and I were on our fall getaway, hiking and biking in nearby mountain states. We were in The Land of Enchantment on a 20-mile bike ride that linked dirt roads, singletrack and a bit of pavement. We passed through a small community with more trailers than stick-built homes and a graveyard decorated with colorful saints and figurines. Being unsure of how far to travel down the paved road before we would turn off on a rough dirt track, local data was required. We saw no buildings or business where we could ask directions.

During the about a quarter-mile we biked through that village, we saw only three people. There were two guys patching concrete in front of a Catholic church, but neither seemed to understand us. We then came upon an old lady raking leaves in front of her trailer. Though her English was spotty, and my Spanish was worse, she held up her thumb and index finger close together and we got the message that the turn-off was near. 

Just before the junction to the National Forest, we approached two little brown-skinned kids — a boy and girl — pushing a bicycle. The girl was older, maybe 9 or 10, the boy a couple years her junior. I noticed the chain had fallen off their bicycle — obviously the reason they were pushing not riding.

 Assuming, there would be a language barrier, I yelled, “DO YOU NEED HELP WITH YOUR BIKE?”

The excessive volume of my question and my approach from behind caused the little boy to flinch. If I surprised the little girl, she hid it well. Rather she turned, smiled, and said in perfect English, “Oh thank you, sir, my little brother was showing off and caused the chain to fall off his bicycle.”

The easiest way to put a chain back on is to turn a bicycle upside down. The little boy initially resisted as I took the bike out of his hands to do just that. It took only couple of minutes to reinstall the chain. I then used an adjustable wrench to loosen the axel nuts and slide the rear wheel a little further back into the horizontal drop-outs to tighten the chain.

As soon as the bike was upright once again, the boy jumped back on and began doing fast donuts in the road. His sister yelled at him in Spanish, and he slowed down. She turned to me and said, “Thank you so much for stopping to help us. Enjoy your ride.”

She hollered something to her brother again in Spanish and he then turned, smiled, and said, “Thank you, sir.”

Just before we turned off the main road, I looked back and saw the little boy riding circles around his sister as she walked down the road. The irony soon hit me.

Here I was making assumptions of the language proficiency of those two kids due to my own biased preconceptions when, in truth, they were much more linguistically capable than I. Both of them spoke two languages well, while I, with my heavy Boston accent, often have to repeat myself in much of my own nation. 

Like it or not, we all are, in some part, products of our parents’ values. By today’s standards, my parents would be considered bigoted. It’s not that they felt Blacks, Jews, gays or other assorted minorities, were necessarily evil or inferior, they just subscribed to the various racial, social and religious stereotypes of the day. 

During my teens, I judged them harshly. The years have since tempered my opinions. Both my parents were the children of immigrants — a bias for them was an excepted reality. They were of the era when newspapers ran classifieds with the disclaimer “Irish need not apply.” Their upbringings were ones of a prideful and suspicious separation of the races and religions. This attitude softened as they aged, but they never totally let go of it.

If history is any indication, each generation (with some recent exceptions) brings a more enlightened outlook. I would imagine my parents were more opened-minded than their parents, and I’d like to think my generation — a generation that traveled from whites-only restrooms in the Deep South to a Black president of the United States — has evolved even further. Though, granted, much progress has been made, sometimes it takes the children to remind me that America’s future comes in all shapes, sizes, creeds and colors. And hopefully many of them will ride bicycles.