Dumped carelessly on its side in an East Gibson Street snow bank, the child’s bike lay abandoned for days. Before it fell somebody at least leaned the blue Huffy Rock It kid’s bike against a tree. My first thought was that some Hill Section hooligan stole the bike and ditched it when an impromptu joyride ended.

Even as a 74-year-old I could relate to how the bicycle’s owner must have felt.

A thief stole my English bike when I was 10, riding away from the side street outside our rented corner house where I left my three-speed with the handlebar shifter on the sidewalk before parking it on the back porch for the night. When I went outside and realized the bike was missing, I raced up and down several streets desperately looking for my bike to no avail. Days later police found the bike undamaged in another town miles away, a happy ending from a bygone time when cops would spend time looking for a kid’s lost bike with a baseball card attached  with a clothespin to the back fork to hit the spokes and make a flapping sound like an imaginary motorcycle engine.

The bike in the snow pile looked to be in decent shape.

My plan was to take a picture on my phone and email the photo to Scranton Police Chief Tom Carroll. He could then dispatch an officer to pick up the bike and check to see if anybody reported a bike stolen. If so, we could reunite the bike with its owner and all live happily ever after.

But I was concerned the chief would ignore my inquiry as he has ignored several recent emails about whether the police department maintains a working relationship with ICE. Carroll used to respond to my emails until I started asking questions neither he nor congressional candidate and his boss Mayor Paige Cognetti want to answer.  In my last email I asked Carroll if Cognetti ordered him not to respond to my questions. The chief ignored that email too.

I also thought about calling 911 but wondered if an emergency call might be inappropriate in a city where serious crime including murder can increasingly erupt at any moment and require immediate attention.

But when I was taking a picture of the bike a woman spoke to me through the screen in her ground floor apartment window, telling me I could have the bike if I wanted it because her landlord put the bike out with the garbage. Sanitation workers had picked up the garbage the day before and left the bike.

Maybe the landlord thought a scrap metal hunter would take the bike. In this city too many hardworking people scour neighborhood streets for other people’s castoffs. They need furniture or money to pay heating, food, child care and other bills, especially in a cold winter like the one we’re experiencing.

If the deserted bike worked, and I don’t know it did, why didn’t the landlord take the bicycle to a place that accepts bikes and even makes small repairs, fixing broken bikes for kids who need them? Why hadn’t some well-meaning city cop placed the bike into the trunk of a squad car and dropped it off at such a place?

While on patrol in 1957 my Pennsylvania State Police trooper father once encountered several small children crying because their family goat had died. Within days Shamus had a new goat sitting beside him in the patrol car as he drove in uniform to the farm to drop off the animal. Now laughing children named the goat Corby, Not only did these Black boys and girls have a new goat but a stellar impression of white police as well.

I might have picked up the bike if I weren’t hobbling around waiting for a new hip. Maybe guilt provoked me to write this column in the first place. So why didn’t somebody else do a good deed and help turn what many people consider junk into a gift?

Ask the apartment building landlord.

Ask Chief Carroll.

Ask Mayor Cognetti.

Ask Scranton’s beautiful people Gen XYZers who pose taking selfies before altars of The Office themed murals that now define and defy the honorable hardscrabble history of our city.

Ask yourself if the New Year’s idiom “out with the old, in with the new” guarantees good cheer.

Because as Father Time marches on, one lone blue bicycle still lays forgotten against a tree in a dirty snow bank, twisted like the bright memory of a once new little bike that sparkled.