Bike Is Back, but Something’s Still Missing

The story was too good for the papers and TV to pass up:

In an incredible quirk of fate, a 30-year-old Huntington Beach woman was reunited last week with the blue Schwinn bicycle stolen when she was 9 years old. Her first new bike, it had been a Christmas present in 1979 from her parents. Within a year, it was gone.

Not surprisingly then, Wendy Rincon, now married and the mother of a 3-year-old son, was both flabbergasted and happy last week to recover the long-lost bike. Police had traced it to her father, who had etched his driver’s license number into the handlebars all those years ago.

“Remember your bike being stolen?” Rincon’s father told her over the telephone last Monday night.

Police put the story out. Not looking for public attention but accepting the feel-good nature of the story, Rincon was a good sport when media people phoned her for interviews.

But as the full story unfolded, Rincon wondered if the real story was getting lost.

She’d heard originally that police confiscated the bike from a woman arrested for public intoxication. Not until later in the week, Rincon says, did she learn that the woman was homeless too.

From that moment, the feel-good story didn’t feel quite as good.

She was troubled that her good fortune came at the expense of someone else--someone who was using the bike to store and carry her belongings. Police had no reason to think the homeless woman knew the bike had been stolen. She told them she paid $12 for it years ago.

It wasn’t as though the theft of the $200 bike haunted Rincon over the years. Nor did it have heirloom status. She’d had it for less than a year, and while the theft was traumatic for a 9-year-old, she got over it. She also got another one.

There’s some humorous family lore attached too. Several years ago, Rincon’s older brother finally confessed in a lighthearted way that he’d ridden her bike to a sporting goods store that day. He saw someone steal the bike but, at 11, was too embarrassed or fearful to let on that it hadn’t been stolen from the family’s backyard.

“I kept on saying last week, ‘I understand why people think it’s fantastic that I got it back, but it’s just a bike,’ ” she says. “Why I was getting all this attention was way beyond me. I’m a stay-at-home mom, and now I’m in the papers and on the news. Why?”

Somehow, There Must Be a ‘Why’

To her, the “why” wasn’t trivial. “I feel like everything happens for a reason,” Rincon says. “I feel this happened for some reason. My position now is to figure out why. Why after 20 years would I get the bike back? What can we do that can bring some good from it?”

The story hit the papers Thursday. By the next day, Wendy and her husband Paul were of one mind. They wanted to help the homeless woman.

“We rent, we don’t have a lot of extra money,” Wendy says. “But we feel we gained something and she lost something. Let’s try to make this right.”

For reasons that may have to do with the cosmic nature of its return, Wendy has decided to keep her original Schwinn.

But she and Paul went to Target and priced a mountain bike at $90. They aren’t committing themselves to buying a new bike for the woman, but say they’re leaning that way. Even then, they’d still have to find her.

While finances can sometimes be “interesting,” Wendy Rincon says, “we’re making it, we’re getting by. I don’t need a bike. It was transportation when I was 9. I’m now 30, I have a car, so my circumstances are better than hers. Obviously, I felt like I got my bike back and it’s making a great story, but there’s still someone out there without any wheels.”

I reached Huntington Beach Lt. Luis Ochoa over the weekend and he said bringing a bike to the police station wouldn’t be a good idea.

However, Ochoa says, “We would try to help in any way we could, bottom line. Locating someone who’s homeless is not always easy, but it can be done, on occasion.”

Wendy Rincon didn’t contact me for this column; I phoned her after a reader wondered aloud about the homeless woman. Turns out Wendy Rincon had been wondering the same thing.

That’s where things stand today.

“It is, after all, just a bike,” Wendy Rincon says. “But you think, ‘Why is it back?’ I have a hard time wrapping my brain around the fact that it is. Maybe it’s for us to put our own lives in perspective, to be happy with what we’ve had. We say we’d like to have this or that, but maybe we should be satisfied with what we have, because there’s someone out there who had something less than she had a week ago.”

The Rincons aren’t looking to be heroes. It’s just that they’re looking for an ending to the bike story.

“This is something we will do,” Rincon says. “If someone wants to give us a hand, that’s fantastic, but I’m not going to sit back and wait till someone picks up the phone.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by e-mail at dana.parsons@latimes.com.