Monday, May 4, 2015

To get to the other side




I think there's going to be a moral to this story, but I don't know what it is.

I have been biking again. It is part of an elaborate patchwork of activities I am engaged in these days. When I bike I skirt along all the outside edges of what is safe, customary, and legal. I like to think I am a safe biker (my slow speed surely helps!), but, if what everyone likes to think were true, this world would be dazzlingly more bizarre, impossible, and wonderful than it ever will be.

Or so I like to think.

But here is what keeps happening to me: I navigate one of my odd, stealthy, crafty street crossings, all based on cars just continuing to drive as they're legally supposed to and are inclined to do, and yet, they don't. I am timing everything, my brakes, my slow gathering of new speed, to slip through a certain gap in the traffic, just so, and the car stops. The car stops to be nice. The car stops to let me go in front of it. The car stops to help me. But first I must brake out of caution and reorientation. My gears are now wrong, and so is my momentum. They are waiting now as well, so I have to make some serious getting started effort, usually standing in the pedals to drive their heaviness forward. Plus I have to wave to acknowledge the driver and thank them for their misguided and inconveniencing kindness to me.

Actually, I'm still not sure what the moral of this story is, but it does perhaps say something about my preference for walking, especially on paths, far from roads.




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