Some Joys Forgotten

(Originally Nov 6 2005)

Tonight, for probably the first time in twenty years, I hopped on a bicycle and covered distance. I got permission today from the Benefactor to use his kid's bike (left behind in the garage). The sun was already on it's way to Japan and left New Jersey's sky dark as slate. Wind was coaxing the yellow Autumn leaves down like the ornaments in a holiday globe. The air smelled of attics and damp woodpiles and mist.

You see here in Paramus NJ, through some genius of colonial invention, everything that doesn't serve gas or food is shut down on Sundays. ??!!!?!!!?!???!!?!?!!!?!??!? I have no idea why. I also don't know how much farther out of this town this extends. To Ridgewood? To Hackensack? To Allendale? No idea, but I know it's CRAZY. This isn't The (freakin') Village! But what's even crazier is that the public transportation DOESN'T RUN. No buses go nowhere. Now what kind of mess is THAT?

So on Sundays I've contented myself to listening to NPR, then WBAI, then to FanBoy Radio, then fighting crime in Paragon City, or watching TV, or fighting crime in Paragon City some more. And this week, I have a new project to use the hours for, as the additions in My Links (<---) will show.

But I spotted the bicycle with an interested eye last week and the Benefactor was home this morning, so I asked him and he said 'of course'. And he was sober, so I had to give him his props in the Nice Guy category. Then I let the sunlight whittle the sky away before I decided to actually take him up on the permission.

Can you believe I was even a little scared at first? My unshielded body hurtling down the driveway at 0.2 miles an hour? Eep! Then I found some cliches are true, and I was twelve years old again.

I had forgotten how cool it is. And I'd forgotten how far you can go on one! Except for having to contend with car drivers, I found it joyous to be unfettered again. I can reach a mega-Barnes & Noble, now...and a Boston Market...and a Grand Union supermarket...

It occurred a few times to me that I looked for all the world like those unexplicable grown bicycle-riding men I used to pass and scratch my head at when I was a car driver. No, not the dayglo spandex-clad, helmet-wearing Nancies out for their therapuetic Sunday-morning three miles before going home to the condo and popping a cold Merlot before the golf tournament with the Times on their knobby puckered knees. I mean those grizzled warriors hunched over a bicycle that looks vicced from some kids' yard. In my mind, those men are they with one too many DWIs, out on parole, hurrying to their shopping-cart-pushing jobs.

And as I got these episodic revelations, huffing and puffing my way over Rt. 17, I thought to myself "I too am doing what I gotta do to survive." I'm thankful that I never scorned those bicycle men trundling on their several ways to their lives, even though I never gave them credit for being anything other than a recidivist (I knew this word, but I looked it up just instead. Oddly enough, it was my very own Benefactor who taught it to me 15 years ago during a boring Post Office night, of which there were an unending succession).

It seems there's no telling what one will find themselves doing in one's lifetime and there's just no room to scorn your fellow man, lest you discover yourself pedaling more than a mile in their shoes.

It's all good.