From An Island To A Memory Of A Street

 

My friend Sam—one of the first people I met when I moved into my current apartment—took an early ride: me, on Tosca, my Mercian fixed gear and he, on the aluminum Trek road bike I fixed up for him.  The breeze we felt as we crossed the bridge into City Island and at the end of the island itself would be the last relief we would feel before the sun would turn brick-lined streets— which we followed from Pelham Bay  to Bronx Park—into ovens.

The bricks—faded, cracked and pockmarked like faces who have survived winter, poverty, betrayal and the births of those who have died along those streets—smoldered with their remains and the last buds blown away from cherry blossoms, magnolias, crabapples and early spring flowers like tulips and hyacinths planted around those trees.

The too-early-for-the season heat, which reached 95F (35C), turned their shadows, all of them, into the pores, wrinkles and cracks in bricks and concrete slabs that will endure, perhaps, longer than the street—at least, as I have know it—will.

I walked down a street like it, a couple of blocks from where I lived in Brooklyn, on a day like this, which had followed and preceded another like it, near the end of my fifth grade year.  1969: The world was about to change because of events I would know about as they happened—Woodstock, the Apollo 11 moon landing and protests against the Vietnam War and racial prejudice—and ones I wouldn’t know about until later, like Stonewall.

But, even though summer had not officially begun, it seemed to have always been. The faded, flaked bricks and pinks, purples and yellows turning green felt suspended in the haze of that heat. Just as the world beyond it was changing, I somehow knew that what I was seeing and feeling that day wouldn’t be there forever. Nor would I. The heat was no longer only a meteorological phenomenon: I felt, in a way I couldn’t describe, that it was flaring within me.  And within a year it would change me, as it would change my neighborhood.

On my way home that day, I saw a man who, at the time, seemed ancient to me, sitting on his stoop, as he did nearly every day. I would never see him again.

Sam and promised each other we’ll ride again, perhaps tomorrow morning. The afternoon is forecast to be as hot as today.

(More to come.)

Heat: A Harbinger?

I have taught my last class. Now I am reading stray overdue assignments, writing reports and doing the other bureaucratic things faculty members have to do at the end of a semester.  Oh, and I have been exchanging emails with the students I mentioned in an earlier post.

The AIDS walk has just ended in Central Park. I don’t know whether this particular date was chosen for any reason. But it just so happens that yesterday was the anniversary of what some have argued was the beginning of AIDS in the US, even if no one—including the young doctors who treated the first patient—knew it at the time.  Robert Rayford, a 16-year-old Black boy who had never been outside of his home town of St. Louis died.  The ostensible cause was pneumonia, but the two-year-long downward spiral of his health, in which his immune system basically shut down, baffled the doctors so much that they saved samples of his tissue for nearly two decades.

I could say something about why Rayford, raised by a single mother, was not recognized as “Patient Zero” even after tests confirmed the presence of AIDs proteins during the late 1980s. As a poor Black boy who never left his a hometown of St. Louis, his story didn’t fit the narratives constructed by LG (we—T’s and B’s—weren’t included) organizations, which were dominated mainly by White affluent and middle-class gay men.  

Anyway, I mentioned that episode because, in a way, it’s emblematic of this time of year, at least for me. We are in that part of Spring that’s a prelude to Summer and, perhaps, changes no one is anticipating.  An early heat wave is beginning today.  A week from tomorrow will be Memorial Day, the “unofficial” beginning of Summer, even if a cold spell, possibly accompanied by wind and rain, will strike before the “official” beginning of Summer.

That chronological and weather pattern transpired several times in my life, and each time was a prelude to changes in my life, or changes in the world that would affect me, whether or not I recognized, or even could recognize it at the time.

(To Be Continued )

Ross Willard R.I.P,

 About two weeks ago, I mentioned finding a Bike Library in Shirley Chisholm State Park. Until then, I was aware of only one bike library, in Iowa City, which I learned about by chance.

If the idea is spreading, I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, when I first encountered Recycle-A-Bicycle in my hometown of New York, I thought it was the only program of its kind. Now I see that the concept—which involves fixing bicycles for sale or to distribute to kids and people who can’t afford them—has spread all over the country.  Those programs often involve classes in which kids learn to fix, and earn, bikes as well as volunteer opportunities. 

One thing I have always loved about such programs is that they bypass the elitist racer mentality that intimidates people when they walk into shops.  I was once one of those cyclists who believed that if you weren’t pedaling what Grand Tour riders used and didn’t  live on and for your bike, you weren’t a real cyclist.  I now realize that riders like me were a reason why the US didn’t (and in most areas, still doesn’t ) have a cycling culture.  On the other hand, programs like Bike Recyclers show people that bikes can be a viable form of transportation and that you don’t need to have the newest, latest and most expensive, any more than you need a Formula One car to drive to your family’s holiday get-together in another state.

Folks like Ross Willard are the reason why at least some people understand that new bikes aren’t the only good bikes and,  most importantly, how tomake cycling practical and safe.  Best of all, he started Recycle Bicycle Harrisburg in a city that, while it’s Pennsylvania’s state capital, has faced economic challenges. Also, because it’s more spread out than, say, Philadelphia, and lacks public transportation, residents rely heavily on cars. 

Like most worthwhile change, the shift toward bicycling and other forms of non-automotive transportation has come slowly. But Ross Willard got the wheels rolling, if you will.  He, who passes away last weekend, should be remembered and honored for that.