I Want to Ride a Bicycle, I Want to Ride a Bike

The Food Bank Director and his wife are hard-core cyclists. He just passed 5,000 miles on the odometer on his commuter bike, and he and his wife didn't even own a car until a baby was about to arrive. Without baby, they ride bicycles everywhere. The other day he was telling me about the LikeABike. It's a wooden bicycle without pedals that a toddler can push with his or her feet. They plan to get one for baby as soon as he can stand stand up on his own. This bike helps kids learn how to balance, the hard part, before they learn how to ride, the easy part.


Talking about teaching someone how to ride a bike made me think of how I learned to ride one shortly after I turned six. I think it was spring, but winters in San Francisco are so mild that it could have been then. For Christmas, I had received a wonderful pink Schwinn Flyer with a sparkly purple banana seat, tassels on the handles, and a white basket with a pink and purple flower on the front. This description makes me think it is probably the girliest thing I've ever owned that wasn't a dress.


I'd been riding it with one foot on the ground for several months prior; that bike never did have training wheels. I can't remember but J Jump Joyful may have been bike riding by then; certainly her older brother was. We all had vehicles, of course, tricycles and Big Wheels and these things that looked like yellow rafts with wheels and I had a red plastic riding mower with pedals and No had a blue-green plastic sport car with pedals that our parents had had shipped back from France when we came back to the States. We all rode around and around in circles in the big room downstairs, guided by the stoplight my father had found somewhere.


All of us kids must have been there but I only remember JJJ, her dad, and myself at the Panhandle the day I learned to ride the bike on my own. I saw the acorns on the ground and worried that they would "trip" the wheels on the bike. This sounds like a such a cliche, but I really did feel like I was flying as I pedaled, faster and faster, and I felt the bike release from JJJ's dad's hands and I saw the handle tassels stream out and it was no wonder they called it a Flyer!

The section of Panhandle where I learned to ride a beautiful pink and purple bicycle.

Christmas In San Francisco

Today was Cookiethon! over at Park Place. This is a day in December on which HR and some others have a cookie-baking frenzy and bake a boatload of a bunch of different cookies.

I do not make cookies, but I have mad skillz when it comes to eating cookies. Hardly anything is too rich for me and the only thing that keeps me from eating butter and sugar on bread every day is being a grown-up. I had to leave the house for a little bit when the peanut butter cookies came out of the oven, only because the scent was so overpowering I couldn't breathe.


When I mentioned I had never heard the song "Christmas in San Francisco", Nutmeg and I went on an online search for it. We could only find the lyrics and Nutmeg said the song is so bad she couldn't sing it for me. Then she got the idea to ask KOIT, the local easy-listening radio station, and ask them to play it. KOIT is famous (or infamous) for playing Christmas music from sometime in November through Christmas. She wrote an email asking that they play this song for her friend who'd been raised in the city and had never heard it. Just as Zirpu and I were getting ready to leave, the song actually came on. In these multi-cultural times, I think it's okay to use a Yiddish word to describe a Christmas song, and that word is schmaltzy.


All of my favorite Park Place people showed up, including Gaia and Byronium who had just arrived the night before from two weeks in India, and Pumpkin, whom, I believe, I conjured by wearing socks that don't match (as he often does). A couple of very young girls had a grand time decorating the spritz cookies (sugar cookies from the cookie press). Nutmeg insisted we watch Steven Colbert's Christmas Special and we listened to carols on the iPod/CD player. JR brought home a 7' tree on his bicycle. HR, Cutie G, Byronium and others made cookies. The rest of us ate them and drank coffee and eggnog. It was raining and cold (well, not New Hampshire cold) all day.


It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas.

Muscle Memory

I had my first workout with Marlon on Thursday, my first with him since late 2004 or maybe 2005. I walked in feeling very confident, knowing what I needed and having asked for it. I was clear about my goals, and Marlon is very goal-oriented, for himself and for his clients. I was already warmed up when I arrived, since I'd walked on the elliptical for 30 minutes back at my "home gym." Marlon was finishing up with his previous client so he said I should use the foam roller, a torture device by lying on which you can "massage" your own muscles.


I laid the side of my right leg on it and rolled and it hurt. I expected that and grit my teeth for a few rolls back and forth, then did the left side, which hurt even more. I expected that too - the left side is the damaged side from the wreck. I rolled that only a couple times. Then I did my usual stretches to kill the next few minutes until Marlon got to me.


Marlon placed the roller against my buttocks and had me lean back onto it to roll up and down my back. I rolled up (toward my shoulders) and then down, and Marlon said, "You look excited about working out." I said, "I feel scared" and burst into tears. Marlon sat in front of me, looked me in the eyes, and instead of saying "Everything is going to be okay," he said, "I'm scared too. It's been a long time since we worked together, and you've had this really traumatic thing happen to your body." Indeed, how I felt was that this burst of emotion was about the car wreck, unleashed first by the pressure on my IT band (the muscle that runs over the hip and down the outside of the leg), then on my low back, the parts of my body most impacted, in both senses of the word, by the car accident.


I thought about whether my outburst was due to outside reasons, like being tired, or being frustrated that my body isn't as strong now as it has been in the past. But I really think that it is because the body holds emotions of which we are not aware, and holds onto memory in a physical way. We say "muscle memory" to describe the unconscious way that once we've learned something, we just know how to do it without thinking about it - like swimming, or balancing on a bicycle, or the footwork in a dance step. I think that my left leg and low back hold the memory of the accident and fear about getting injured, and the pressure brought all that to the forefront suddenly and overwhelmingly.


Separate from that, the tears made me realize that when I see someone doing something stupid in a car, like cutting through lanes or merging aggressively or thoughtlessly, I do not immediately feel annoyance. My first feeling is fear and my first thought is, "You do not have my permission to hurt me." I often assume that they will merge into me, or that they can't or won't see the car I'm driving. It is why I am a much more cautious driver than I used to be: I do not believe that drivers are always conscious that their cars cannot be in the same place as my car.


Anyway, Marlon and I got through it. He reassured me that he would not let me hurt myself, and would teach me how not to hurt myself when we are not together. He knows me well enough to know that I have a tendency to run with what he teaches me with a little too much, how to put it?, enthusiasm.

The Road

Alton Brown is eating his way along the road again in Feasting On Asphalt. Last season they followed the blue highways from east to west and this season they're following the Mississippi River from south to north. I can't get enough of this show and it's not Alton and it's not the eating. It's the road, or the places and people along the road. I remember as a little kid lying in my bed not sleeping, imagining that I was actually in a motorcycle sidecar zooming over a ribbon of highway.


I've read all kinds of books about people traveling on the highways of the US, fiction and nonfiction (or roman a' clef, in the case of Kerouac), traveling by car, van, motorcycle, bicycle, bus, and on foot. I have done some road-tripping, up and down I-5 so often it has become a dance, and back and forth between the west coast and Colorado. None of it, however, has resulted in meeting people along the way (though I have dined in some fine and not-so-fine diners). I've always been on my way somewhere, trips where the journey was the means to the end, not the means and the end.

The national highway system exists because Eisenhower, a military man, saw that one was needed for national defense - he thought that in this big country of ours, soldiers and supplies needed a way to get to each other that was not reliant on railroads. I've only traveled across half of it by car and I'm always surprised at how far away everything is.

I don't know if I'm the kind of person who could jump out of a car in any small town and have a conversation with a local. I don't know if I'm too shy for that. But I hope that sometime I will be able to take a trip across at least part of the country and have the trip be the trip.