An Inoffensive Mystery

 Yesterday I pedaled La-Vande, my King of Mercia to Point Lookout. On my way back, I hopped on a train in Arverne, near Rockaway Beach, when I saw a storm coming just beyond (or so it seemed) the Boardwalk. Still, I rode about 105 kilometers (65 miles).

At Point Lookout, I shared the sun deck with a couple who, not so long ago, I would have described as “older.” They most likely had only a few years, if any, ahead of me.

The woman had whiter-than-white finger- and toe-nails that could have drawn attention to, or deflected it from, anything else about her appearance. Otherwise she didn’t seem out of the ordinary except, perhaps, for her black and white swimsuit and flip-flops that we’re probably expensive but pretending to try not to look it. 

The man, on the other hand wore a T-shirt with a logo from some event at Notre Dame (the university). At least, that was on the back.  I didn’t see his front until he turned to me and asked, in an almost awkwardly- polite tone, “Is the music bothering you?”

“Not at all, thank you.”

His device played Frank Sinatra at a volume one might hear in the background of a small office. In that space, with a roof and no walls, the sound was even less intrusive.

I grinned to myself. People, mostly young men, play their music, full of heavy bass beats, loud enough to vibrate the walls of buildings they pass as they speed down “strouds” in their “pimped out” cars. None have ever asked anyone the same question I heard from that man in Point Lookout.

Perhaps more ironically, a couole of weeks ago a young man making Fed Ex deliveries boarded an elevator with me. Turned out, we were headed to the same floor. “So you’re Sinatra?”

He looked at me quizzically.

“Going my way?”

Blank stare.

“You’ve heard of Frank Sinatra?”

“No.”

I explained that “The Chairman of the Board” was perhaps the favorite crooner of a generation or two. “You’ve probably heard at least one of his songs-“New York, New York.”

There was a glint of recognition.

“It has the line, ‘I wanna wake up in that city that doesn’t sleep.’”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Well check out You Tube or anyplace else you listen to music. You can find more of his songs.”

I was happy to give that young man a piece, however small, of a proper education. But I don’t know which made me, a Midlife Cyclist feel old, if only for a moment: my having to explain “Ol’ Blue Eyes” to the young man or the older man asking whether 

The Wheel Keeps Turning

 The debates about larger vs smaller diameter wheels and wide vs narrow tires have raged for as long as I can remember 

and, probably, even before my time.

What I Didn’t Know

 Alert: I am, once again, invoking my Howard Cosell rule to write about something not directly related to cycling.  It is, however, a reflection from the vantage point of midlife, as I have defined it on this blog.

The night was hot, even for early summer. Judy Garland had just died, 47 years old. Patrons of a particular bar were mourning her passing. Or, perhaps, they simply wanted to release some tension, or simply have a good time.

Some of the bar’s regular patrons had been forewarned about one event about to take place. But at the time, they could not have known its aftermath.

On this date in 1969, New York City police officers raided a bar. That, in itself, was not unusual. Nor was the fact that its “respectable” patrons—mainly white-collar and creative men with wives and families not very far—at least geographically—from that place had been forewarned.

The remaining patrons consisted of “undesirables ” and “throwaways”: kids kicked out of their homes by families who didn’t approve of their “lifestyles;” others, young and old, who survived on the streets by catering to the most lurid fantasies of men (mainly) richer and more powerful than themselves, and those who were expressing their gender identity and sexuality in then-illegal or yet-unnamed ways.

I am talking, of course, about the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion. I was a week and a day away from turning and would know nothing about what happened that night for many more years. By that time, I was close to midlife—at least as I define it on this blog—and had become an avid cyclist.