My mother was too cheap to buy my brother a bicycle helmet.
The three older kids had survived just fine with nare a protective covering over their sweet noggins but the first and only boy in the family necessitated a hard candy shell and mom didn't want to spring for it. Brother was constantly banging his head/arm/leg/face on something be it stationary or by the hands of his older sisters and when bike riding came into the fold a helmet was a logical step.
Mom was an avid yard-saler and would often come home with things we did not want/need/use and she's proudly show off the new-used purchases' wonders to the bemused faces of her skeptical children.
One Saturday mom came home with a bright orange-yellow hockey helmet. It was the color of the crayon a child would choose to use to draw in the noonday sun; a color that causes conspicuousness to hide. It was an adult small, much too big for Brother's 6 year-old noggin but this oversight hardly mattered. Brother's head would be protected, and that protection cost about 75 cents. When we put the helmet on him we'd have to cinch it all the way down, so that the ear holes covered his cheeks and the two parts of the buckle would be only about an inch apart, hanging loosely under his chin. Once that was as tight as we could get it (which wasn't much) he'd be set to go for a play. It would sit so far back on his head that it really only covered the back quarter of his melon and his big ears hung out the sides, making him look very much like a wing-nut. An orange-capped wing-nut.
We lived on a very quiet, very seldom driven gravel country road, but this helmet situation would have embarrassed my brother even if his only witnesses had been the trees. He refused to wear it.
I couldn't blame him, I pretended I didn't know him when he was wearing it, but then again I pretended I didn't know him all the time so my opinion on the matter hardly counted for much.
My older sister decided she wanted to help out Brother. She thought maybe if we decorated the helmet he'd be more inclined to wear it. I don't quite remember the details of how it came about, but I do remember my sister proudly displaying the new and improved version of the Hockey Helmet from Heaven, this version entirely decorated with glittery puffy paints. You know the kind.
Her version of humor was to paint on the back of the helmet one of those big reflective orange triangles one sees on the back of tractors or other slow-moving farm equipment that travels the roads, so that when Brother did finally wear the helmet out on the road, he'd be sporting the same signage as that John Deere down the street.
I called my sister to ask her what else she remembers painting onto the hockey helmet but all she could recall were pink glittery swirls along with the orange triangles so that didn't help much. My brother remembered about the same, and validated the previous comment about the pink glittery swirls. Brother also recalled when we'd roller-skate in our unfinished basement and he'd have to wear the helmet and we'd all sing and dance to “Stop in the Name of Love” as it was the only song we knew that contained traffic signals.
The end.
