Bikes

I remember going with my dad to look at bikes. Not a bike store mind you, but at someone's house in the Westbourgh neighborhood of my home town. It felt like some kind of magic that we could be getting "new" bikes. I vaguely remember a short discussion on price. $25 or was it $45. For two bikes. Two "new" bikes!

They were girls bikes. Not cool. At first it didn't matter and then it did. I've had vivid recurring dreams of biking full speed into the slack chain link fence in my school's playground. I would brag the the fence would catch me like a net. It didn't. It hurt. The dreams are so vivid that from time to time, I think I may have really done it.

Fast forward a couple of years and those bikes are gone and somehow my dad agrees to buy a used bike from a classmate of mine. One of those cool kids that got new, cool bikes. And here he was going to sell his old cool bike to me. It had shock absorbers. My god. I think it cost $55 which was an outrageous sum. It needed work. I stood near my dad along the side of the house as he was trying to get it into riding shape. He wasn't the handiest of men. He also wasn't the most receptive to suggestions. Suggesting a specific lug nut that might fit was not a good idea. I remember following him into the house and him saying proudly to my mom "this may be the best thing I've done as a father". This very strange thing to my 7th child, 7th grade self. My dad was a year or so into his sobriety at that point, so maybe it was that. I didn't have that bike for long. One day during basketball practice some of the "cool" boys from my school took it and were jumping stairs with it. The frame cracked. The cool kids and one in particular were not bad kids and felt bad. One said his dad would beat him if he came home with a broken bike. My dad did not beat me. It was terrifying to tell him. I was not afraid of being beaten. Afraid of disappearing? No, that's not it. Afraid of existing. Existing in his anger. And he was very angry. He wanted to know the names of all the kids who rode the bike and he was going to call their parents. I'm not sure if he did. I think he was even more upset that his son wasn't one of the cool kids.

Early in high school I had a paper route and I road a ten speed bike to deliver the papers. But not on Sundays, that needed a cart. I also rode the ten speed bike to my first year of college when I was banned from driving the family car.

The first bike I bought as an adult was a his and hers wedding present. Mountain bikes. "Good ones" unless you knew something about bikes. I rode that bike a fair amount, on weekend rides, to the office. I don't remember what I did with it. Maybe donated it when we moved to China.

In China, I've bought three bikes. A relatively cheap one when we first got here that I used to bike around the neighborhood and to my first Chinese class. Then, a nicer road bike that I used to commute to the subway station for a couple of years but suffered from disuse and abuse and eventually my apartment complex moved it away. Then there was the era of low cost bike rentals which I've used over the past few years for the occasional bike home from work and frequently to bike around town.

Which leads me to my most recent bike purchase. Brought to you by coronavirus. The justification was this - after working from home for seven weeks my office is reopening gradually and as one of the leaders I should go in (and I could use the change of scenery). My family here is worried about me taking mass transit and I want to respect that worry, so I'm not going to take it. I could drive, take a taxi, or a Didi, but I made a commitment several years back not to commute by car. Hence the bike. I'll make my first pedal on it tomorrow.