The End Of A Year In The Middle Of My Life

 Today I took what, probably, will be my last ride of 2024. It more or less followed an unplanned route my neighbor Sam and I rode earlier this year, through four of New York City’s five boroughs.

Having moved to the Bronx earlier this year, I’ve been exploring some new routes. I think I’ve found a couple that will be part of my regular routines and, more important, won’t simply be adaptations of rides I took while living in Astoria.

I guess looking for, and doing, those new rides has been emblematic of what 2024 has been for me:  not only adapting to, but creating from, change.  

Nine months ago I left Astoria, where I lived 21 years, for a senior citizens’ apartment by the New York Botanical Garden and Fordham University. I cried every night, and many days, for a few weeks. The change wasn’t just one of geography or living space:  Many of my new neighbors indeed fit, for better and worse, American society’s notions of “old” people. Some use walkers or wheelchairs; others are infirm in less visible ways. But they also have lived lives, some of which I can scarcely imagine but others that are familiar in ways I hadn’t expected.

Seen during my ride today—in the Bronx.

While I am not the only person in my building who rides a bicycle, I’ve developed an identity as “the bike rider” or “la ciclista” among other residents.  Perhaps it’s because they see me more frequently on or with one of my bikes than they see other residents with theirs. 

Whatever anyone’s perception might be, as long as I am cycling, I am in the middle of my life—and the change from one year to another is but another part of my journey.

So here’s to the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025–in the middle of my life.

As The Sun Sets On 2014

I guess I could say that I ended this year in a way that reflects the kind of year it's been:  rather lovely, but unexceptional.  

Early this afternoon, I boarded Tosca for a ride through familiar places to a familiar destination. Even the detours were familiar:  through backstreets lined with cute little brick houses and restaurants of various nationalities, by the tidal marshes by Jamaica Bay and up and down stretches of reconstructed, but still not reconnected, boardwalks in Rockaway Beach and Jacob Riis Park.  

Those detours, and the headwind into which I pedaled through much of my ride made it longer, timewise, than it would normally be.  Even though I did not consciously choose them, I believe that some internal guide steered me through them.  (If Thoreau were alive today, would he say write that if a person does not keep pace with his or her companions, perhaps it is because he or she is guided by a different GPS?)  And where might that internal navigator been leading me?

Where else?:  Coney Island, just as the sun was beginning to set.  Somehow it seemed just right for my last ride of 2014.

Thank you all for following me on my journeys through this blog. as wild or mundane as they may be.  I hope you will join me for more in 2015!