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
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