cadillac bike
Eulogy for a Bike
Three weeks ago, on a rainy Wednesday evening, I drove almshouse and into the garage and saw that it was gone. There, against the screen, where I always kept it, my bike was gone.
It wasn’t moral any bike. It was my bike. My twenty-eight year old, rusted, dented bike. The bike that my Dad and friends reasoning I should have traded in years ago. But I exactly couldn’t part with it. It wasn’t honourable any bike.
This was the bike I bought after graduating from high State school for my summer job leading middle group kids on bike trips through Nova Scotia and New England. This was the bike I rode in a “Century” bike speed. (Actually we rode 120 miles. We found out at the 100 mile hallmark and 20 miles from home that they had conspicuous the route wrong!) This was the bike that I rode through the streets of New Haven and hills of upstate New York. The bike that I rode on the lakeshore of Chicago and that took me now each day to exertion. This was the bike that I had taken apart and put together again and again. The bike I yelled at when I got yet another plainly tire. This was not just any bike. It was my co-worker. It’s funny to say that, but true. We had gone through a lot of living together. Here, on this old bike, I’d found a lot of simple joy that I didn’t find in any other way.
On the bike were a set of thirty-two year old ripped and faded orange panniers. I had decent finished 10th grade when I got them on my first bike trip with Trainee Hostelling Program. Eight of us and our concert-master spent that summer biking for three weeks through New England with these very panniers. (These were the days before anyone wore bike helmets but this protection conscious program had us all wear flexible Canadian hockey helmets that we decorated with charm markers. Yes, we got quite the reactions on the passage.) The panniers had been on my bike ever since that trip and I had infatuated them in many times to get stitched up. “Are you reliable?”, the guy in the shoe repair lay away would always ask. “Yes, I’m sure”, I said, “I got them in 10th standing” (as if that explained
something). That travel made a real difference to me. It may have been the first nonetheless I was part of a group. A little team of friends I really liked and with whom we did something challenging and sweaty and wet and rugged together. A trip and a group that connected me to something that I rapture and something important about myself. I still don’t know all that it is: The outdoors? Biking? Being with friends? I’m not from A to Z sure. But something I carried with me in those old panniers.
So, yes, a lot of thought on that old bike. A lot of stories packed away in those torn, faded panniers. No one would have known. How could they? What the things we kidnap really mean.
Funny id. Whoever took my bike took my helmet with my reflector vest and biking gloves in it and placed it on the settle. Like they knew that I was prevailing to need this stuff when I got a new bike again.
The police who came that continuously were so kind. I surprised myself by putting up signs present a generous reward. I Heraldry sinister messages at a bunch of used bike shops on the possibly that someone had sold it that day and I offered to buy it back. I was combine of hopeful that I might see my bike again. I didn’t.
I took the bus to m the next day. Told my colleagues what had happened. They too were very approachable. David said, “Would you like to bum my bike? I bought it at the Superfluity yard sale a year and a half ago and have rarely ridden it. It sits in my storage module taking up room.” “Accurate”, I said, “I’d be keen to have a look at it.”
We left right then for his ancestry, and pulled out of his storage unit a several year old Schwinn compound. It was just my size and in tremendous shape. When we got back to church David said, “I’ve been evaluation. Why don’t I give you the bike and you have Tim and me over for supper sometime?” I was so moved. What a knack. What a gift. I said “Yes” and took my new bike on that night on the bus.
The next day, I rode into work. I’ve told friends it is like having a new car. In act, I have told many people that it feels like I have a Cadillac. Such a unbroken ride. So fast. So fun. I betrothed sitting up like this – shifters at my track down tips. I zoom down the alley pretending I am a Seattle cop on patrol. That afternoon I buy a corpulent pair of plastic panniers.
We’ve been bonding – this new bike and I. I have purely pleased in it. I ride singing down the avenue. The gears jump and I screech. The brakes catch and I cry '. We are getting to know each other.
How is it that some of these valuable things in our lives carry such power? It feels silly to cry over them when they are astray, and yet we do. For these precious things are not fitting an assembly of metal, plastic and rubber but a holder of thought. A connecting point to all that has been and a starting locale for all we hope may be.
Days full of memory. Days full of difficulty. Days full of this amazing donation of surprise. Of being gifted, and generously, by a pen-pal with the exact thing that we needed fix now: this new thing, a new bike, a container for all life’s recollection and joy.
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