A Sunday Without A Ride

The doctor was right when she said that my eye infection was viral rather than bacterial.  That's the reason why it's cleared up on its own, albeit slowly.  So my eyes aren't burning.  But the virus seems to have moved to other parts of my body:  I've been congested and my Eustachian tube (what connects the inner ear with the throat) feels as inflamed as my eyes felt.  


I think it's the reason why I felt so tired after riding home from work on Thursday night, and have felt tired ever since.  It figures I would feel this way when we were having a Perfect Fall Weekend.  


It's Sunday.  Perhaps a bit of worship(!) might be in order:

Is there a Church of the Long Island Rail Road?  (Yes, they spell it as two words.)  Near the foot of this "shrine" is one of God's creatures:

Her name is Kiki.  She patrols a tiny snack shop in Woodside, where I've stopped on my rides to or from work.  She claims to be Charlie's long-lost sister.  


Anyway...If I'm posting about railroad power lines and cats in delis, I really need to get back on my bike.  I will.  I'd argue that it beats other ways of transportation:

Is this the real reason why they're the only US automaker that hasn't gone bankrupt?

Pedalling To A Dream, Twenty Years Later

The other day I pedalled to and from work--my regular and side jobs.  And during my ride home, I took of my favorite detours.

I took this photo from Fort Totten, on the North Shore.  I think it's the first time I rode inside the former base after sunset, much less by the light of the full moon we had the other night.  


Once, when the Fort was still an active military facility, I took a moonlight ride through the park just outside the gates.  Then, as now, a path skirted the edge of the water and passed underneath the Throgs Neck Bridge. That path and park were as lovely then as they are now.  

That night--more than a lifetime ago, at least for me--I coasted down Bell Boulevard, from St. Mary's Hospital, where I was doing poetry and creative writing workshops with handicapped and chronically ill kids.  The wonderful thing about doing poetry with kids of that age--especially those who have never gotten out of their wheelchairs or beds-- is that you don't have to tell them to dream.  For them, their unconscious and conscious lives are one.  Even if they cannot escape the constraints of their bodies, they aren't simply imagining that they are running, flying, jumping or dancing because their minds and are actually in moving in a jeu d'esprit with the light of their own stars.


I remember pedalling on that cold, windy night with a moon as full as the one I saw the other night and wishing that I could have brought those kids there with me.  After all, if I could be so moved, I could only imagine what kind of effect such a night in such a place would have on them.


Then I got very angry--at myself, because there was no one else there that night, and at that place for stirring up such passions in me--when I realized that all I was wishing for them was my own experience which, by definition, they never could have, any more than I could have lived their lives.  And the crisp clarity of that night's sky--which was reflected, again, the other night--was, in reality, as chimeric as the lights seen in the mist.


They might have enjoyed being in that place as much as I did, but they didn't need it--or, at least, they didn't need it as much as I did--in order to dream.  In fact, the crisp, almost brittle, moonlit chill seemed like the clearest sort of reality the way any sort of shock or trauma seems the moment after you experience it.  It seems so real precisely because it's the only reality you have at that moment.  But that is exactly the reason not to trust whatever perceptions or sensations you have at such a time--though, of course, you cannot trust anything else. There is no past or future, there is only the present--not even the Eternal Present-- just the moment, repeated a million times every second until there is no other moment to repeat.  Repetition does not generate clarity; it merely breeds familiarity.  


And so I pedalled home that night.  And some of those kids where wheeled back to the homes of their biological or other families, while others stayed in their beds in the hospital.


What I didn't realize, at least consciously, was that I was dreaming of the ride I took the other night.  Heck, I didn't even want to know, much less admit, that I could still dream that way.  


I was very tired the other night:  Some would say that I probably shouldn't have ridden.  But, somehow, even though I was pedalling at about half my normal number of RPMs, I felt as if I were levitating on bay water rippling between the surface of the path and the moonlight that was reflecting off it.  That is not to say that it was all effortless; I was very, very tired.  But I was not exhausted; I was not beaten:  I couldn't help but to ride, to keep on riding, as the light of that moment filled me.  


In other words, I was in a dream.  I hadn't gone in pursuit of it, at least not the other night.  But I really never had any choice but to follow it, even when I didn't know that I still could still dream it.


I fell asleep not long after getting home.

Back In The Saddle Again

Today was the first time I've spent any time at all on any of my bikes in a week and a half.  My eye infection seems to cleared up, finally.  My riding consisted solely of errands, and it was my first time on the Gyes "Parkside" saddle I've installed on Marianela, my old LeTour.


I made a couple of other changes to her, too.  As I had a bottom bracket and chainring, and had gotten a suitable pair of crankarms cheaply, I took off the old double crankset.  Marianela is now a true single-speed.

And I sold the old cranks on eBay for a bit more than I paid for what's on the bike now.  Because the cranks were engraved with the "LeTour" name, they had some value, apparently, to someone who was doing a period-correct restoration.  Ditto for the stem, which I sold and replaced with a newer steel stem that has a longer extension and is a bit more upright.


After having a seat stolen, I am using an old messenger trick on the new saddle.

I took an old single-speed chain and cut it to the length I needed to wrap around the saddle rails and seat stays.  I inserted the chain segment into a piece of old inner tube, and after wrapping the encased chain around the saddle rails and seat stays, I riveted the ends of the chain together.  


I'm going to keep the ratty-looking paint, as that bike is parked on the streets.  Besides, I like the color, even with the current state of the paint job.

What I Carried In The Original Messenger Bag

Sometimes I wish I'd saved the bag I used when I was pedaling the canyons of Manhattan to deliver legal documents, fabric samples, slices of pizza (!),manuscripts--and a few envelopes and packages with their own unwritten "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policies attached, if you know what I mean.

That was a strange time in my life. I had a college degree. I'd lived and worked in Paris.  But I had absolutely no idea of what I wanted to do next.  Actually, I didn't want to know:  I knew that I could be turned into a writer and/or an educator, in some fashion or another, but I was too angry to want those things, or much of anything else. And I was stupid enough to think that sort of anger made me superior to-- or, at least, more sensitive or wounded than-- other people.

I told family members and my few friends (actually, by that time, one friend) that I wasn't ready to commit to a profession, or to even work in an office.  The truth was that I couldn't have done those things, to please them or anyone else.  And there simply wasn't anything else motivating me to do those things--or much of anything else, quite frankly.


A grandmother and an uncle who were very close to me had recently died.  And a friend had committed suicide. Of course, I had other demons and ghosts as well.  I didn't think anyone else could understand them; in truth, they didn't even make sense to me.  So,  I didn't want to talk, much less answer, to anyone unless I absolutely had to. 


So what else could I have been, at that time in my life, but a messenger?  


Remember that in those days--circa 1983--there was absolutely no status in being a messenger.  It wasn't a job that hipsters (or their equivalents in those days) did.  And only the really hard-core cyclists rode fixed-gear bikes; they weren't the status symbols of those who were trying to show, or make themselves or their friends believe, they weren't bourgeois.  


At that time, messenger bags weren't fashionable accessories.  


So, when I stopped messengering (Surely some English teacher told you "Gerunding nouns is wrong."  I didn't listen. It just figures that I teach English now.),  I sold my bag without thinking about it.  I'd just begun to work for American Youth Hostels, when it was located on Spring Street and the neighborhood still had some halfway interesting art and sandwich shops with names like "Rocco and His Brothers." One guy, named Judah, used to hang out there when he wasn't making his rounds on his old  Peugeot.  He had been a messenger, it seemed, since before the rest of us were born.  I used to see him on the streets when I was dodging cabs and pedestrians for my commissions.  So, at one time or another, did every other messenger in Manhattan.  


He told me that a friend of his was going follow him into the business I'd just left and therefore needed a messenger bag.  I'd used mine for about a year. Smog, slush, rain, pizza drippings, spilled drinks-- and a couple of burns from cigarettes that weren't made by companies that contributed to the campaigns of Southern politicians-- left their almost-still-viscous mosaic on the once-bright green canvas. Still, the bag was as strong as it was the day I bought it.  So, Judah's courier- novitiate friend paid me not much less than I paid for the bag.


When I bought it new, it was just like the bag in this photo--except, of course, that mine was green:

It was made--to my order--by a small company called Globe Canvas, which was located in the basement of some building in Chinatown, if I remember correctly.   The guy who, it seemed, was Globe Canvas asked which messenger service I was working for.  From my answer, he knew which size and color bag to make.  He was an older Italian gentleman and seemed like one of those forces of nature that always did, and always would be doing, whatever you saw him doing.  I hear that he died a couple of years ago.  I'm not surprised, as he was far from being a young man even then.


Anyway, these days, it seems that every other company that makes a messenger bag--or, more precisely, a bag that reflects the self-conscious aspirations to hipness of its owner as much as the style of the bag I carried for a year--says that theirs is the "original."  


I say that if any bag was the original, nobody would--or could--buy it.  Only the down-and-out, reject-of-society messenger of yore could ever have had such a thing.  And he wouldn't be bragging about it.


It was a great bag, though.  Almost nothing you can buy today is as well-made.  I'd love to have it now, even if I haven't used a messenger bag since the day I made my last delivery.
 

Missing A Ride

Today I had planned to go for a ride with my cousin.  Back in January, I went bike shopping with him.   He ended up with a Bianchi hybrid, on which he swapped the stock saddle for a wider one.  He's a bit older than I am, and hadn't ridden for decades before he bought his mount. I am happy that he bought a bike that he'll actually ride; I won't try to nudge him toward a more "serious" bike.


This would have been the first time we rode together.  However, I had to cancel:  My eye infection is still healing, and I don't want to take any chances.  Plus, having this infection has left me very tired.  I remember reading somewhere that a significant portion of our body's energy goes toward making our eyes function.  It makes sense:  When our eyes are tired, we are tired.  


It's just my luck that today has been just about everybody's idea of a perfect fall day.  It's been pleasantly cool and crisp, and the sun has shone brightly.  It's a welcome change from the driving rain we had for a couple of days, and the two days of 40mph-plus wind gusts that followed.  It's exactly the sort of day when I want to get on my bike, period.  


I wonder whether doctors are being sarcastic when they refer to people like me as "patients."

When You Have A Couple Hundred To Blow

You can't make this stuff up.

Believe it or not, at least two companies are actually making carbon fiber racks that clamp on seat posts.  They both look something like what you see in the photo.


Bontrager and Topeak both claim that their versions of the carbon-fiber seat post rack can support seven kilograms.  That's reasonable enough, I guess:  If I had a seatpost-mounted rack, I don't think I'd want to put much more weight on it.  And, if I were going to carry panniers and camping equipment, I don't think I'd be using any seatpost-mounted rack, whatever its material.


Then again, I don't think I'd be using anything made of carbon fiber if I were carrying much more than a spare tube and a multitool on my bike.  Actually, I don't have, and don't plan to install,  anything carbon fiber on any of my bikes.   Whatever weight savings those feathery tidbits might offer would be negated by the weight my body is storing, as bodies are wont to do when they reach my age.  And the carbon-fiber weight savings would certainly be nullified by, say, saddle or pannier bags, let alone what anyone might put in them.


And although failure is relatiively rare in high-quality bike parts and accessories, I wouldn't want to take the chance of breaking any carbon-fiber part or accessory. Carbon-fiber tubes are particularly nasty when they fail:  They break along a jagged edge, like a glass bottle.  And carbon-fiber edges are as sharp as those bottle fragments.  If a carbon fiber seatpost were to fail, having an uncomfortable saddle would be the least of my worries.  All that beautiful work Dr. Bowers did would certainly be for naught!


Of course, a broken rack wouldn't have the same consequences.  But things could get ugly once that broken rack and its contents fall into the rear wheel.  And if that wheel is made of carbon...


Maybe I'm just getting old and cranky, but I still think that fiber belongs in cereal and carbon in filters.   

A Mixted-Up Free Spirit

This bike was parked on West 14th Street, near Sixth Avenue, in Manhattan:

It's a rather odd mishmash of bike design.  On one hand, it's a traditional American women's frame with a swooped-down top tube.  Another aspect of traditional American desgn is the mini-stay connecting the top tube with the down tube, which is also curvy in the manner of traditional American women's frames.

What I found interesting, though, is the top tube consists of twin parallel tubes, not unlike what we see on French-style mixte frames.  And those tubes are welded together, as they were on lower-priced American bikes of the time, rather than lugged and brazed or filet-brazed.  

This bike also has an Ashtabula (one-piece) crank, which was also typical of lower-priced American bikes of the time.  

The bike is a Free Spirit, which was a line of bikes sold by Sears during the 1970's and early 1980's.  Most of those bikes, as you might imagine, weren't the sort of things bought by high-mileage cyclists or entusiasts.  Most of them, like the one in the photo, were made by one of the lower-end American manufacturers like Murray or Huffy, although there were a couple of "lightweight" models--including one with Reynolds 531 straight-gauge tubing in the main triangle--made in Austria by Steyr-Puch, the same company that made Puchs and Austro-Daimlers.  Later Free Spirit bikes were made in Taiwan, before bikes from that country gained respect from dedicated cyclists.

They, and other sporting goods sold by Sears, were endorsed by none other than Ted Williams.  He was a great player, but somehow I don't think of him as a free spirit.  (I never saw him play, as he was a bit before my time.  However, he has my respect because, in his Hall of Fame induction speech, he advocated for the induction of Negro League players, none of whom were enshrined in the Hall at that time.)  

I'm sorry I couldn't take a better photo.  I was squirreling in between the few inches (I ain't as skinny as I used to be!)  between the bike and the scaffold for a building that's under removation.  So I couldn't get into a much better position to take a photo.  Also, I used my cell phone, as I didn't have my camera with me.  I  had gone to my doctor, who monitored the healing of the conjunctivitis I came down with, and I wasn't riding or thinking much about photography.  

The bike looks as if it was ridden once or twice after it was purchased, then it was holed up in a garage or basement before its current owner found it in a thrift shop or garage sale.  Although it's a bike I wouldn't buy for myself, I'm glad it's getting use,  And, even though I never liked the paint jobs on this or any other Free Spirit, I think this one is kinda cute, if in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way, with that basket on the front.

Beryl Burton and Lana Lawless

I am going to mention Lana Lawless and Beryl Burton in the same post. Why?, you ask.


Well, I just happened to read about both of them today.  All right, you say, but what else do they have in common?


Not much, I'll admit.  But Beryl Berton is relevant to a question brought up by what Lana Lawless has done.


Ms. Lawless has made the news during the last couple of days because she's suing the Ladies Professional Golf Association because they won't let her play in their tournaments.  Why is that?


The LPGA is excluding her for the same reason they would probably exclude me, even if I met the organization's other requirements.  Yes, Ms. Lawless (Don't you just love the name?) is transgendered.  She had her sexual reassignment surgery in 2005.  


The LPGA, and much of general public--even some who are fully willing to accept that Ms. Lawless is as much of a woman as Lisa Ann Horst--argue that Lawless and other transgender women have advantages conferred upon them as a result of their XY chromosomes.  Although I don't have any statistics handy, I'd bet that, on average, we are taller and heavier than most women born with XX chromosomes.  Also, we have broader and denser bone structures (which is the reason why, even after years of taking estrogen, which weakens bones, osteoporosis is all but unknown in male-to-female transgenders) and, usually, more muscle mass. 


Now, it's easy to see how such differences would confer advantages on us (well, not me, given  my age and the shape I'm in!) in sports like American football--or in basketball, where height makes right.  But even in the latter sport, mens' (or trans-women's ) advantage isn't as great as one might think, since basketball players of both genders are in the top percentile for height.  (I mean, really, how much advantage does someone who's seven feet tall have over someone who's six-foot-nine?)  And, while I admit I don't know much about golf, as I've neither played the game nor followed the sport, I still have to wonder just how much of  an advantage one gender really has over an other.  Some argue that someone with XY chromosomes can make longer shots, but somehow I suspect there's more to winning a golf tournament than that.  Otherwise, why would there be so much of an audience for it, and why would even social golfers spend so much time practicing.


My point is, it's commonly assumed that if a woman with XY chromosomes were to enter a women's competition, she would dominate it and eliminate the women's competition's/league's/race's raison d'etre--or, at least, eliminate its audience and sponsorship.


That brings me to Beryl Burton.  She dominated British women's cycling at a time when it was coming to its own.  In fact, she was arguably as well-known as the male racers of her time.


That's because, at one point, she held the 12-hour time trial record.  Not the women's record, mind you--the record.  Moreover, she held that record for two years (1967-69), and at 277.25 miles,  she had an advantage of five miles over the men's record.  


Think about it:  She was riding faster, over a distance, than most of the male professional cyclists of her time.  And her record still stands as the women's record; only a handful of men have beaten it--even though she was riding in the days before disc wheels, carbon frames and skinsuits.


You might argue that she is an exception.  She is certainly unusual, but she's not the only female athlete to have held  a record for both men and women. Such a thing is relatively common in swimming and a few other non-contact sports.  As an example, when Gertrude Ederle set the record for swimming across the English Channel, her time was a full two hours faster than the previous record, which had been set by a man.


So, the examples I've set out beg this question:  How much of men's dominance of sports is really due to men's actual or alleged superior athleticism?  Could it be that men's dominance in sports other than American football, basketball, or a few others, is really due to the facts that they've been playing longer and that there is more of an infrastructure, if you will, of sports for boys than there is for girls?  Even after nearly four decades of Title IX, it's a lot easier to find a team, league or program for boys than it is to find their counterparts for girls, particlarly in smaller and rural communities.  


And what does that portend for the future of transgenders in sport?

Cycling Couples and Bike Buddies

Much has been written, on various blogs and elsewhere, about cycling couples.  Most of those articles, entries and rants are about male-female couples of one variety or another.  

It seems that at least half of what I read on the subject concerns the disparity in ability, training, interest--or in the bicycles ridden--between the female and male half of the couple.  


When I first started cycling, the subject was mentioned only in passing, and only by men.  (Nearly everyone who cycled for non-utility purposes in those days was a man.)  In one of his books, Fred de Long referred to his wife as his "tandem partner."  I always wondered whether she was already cycling when she met him.  Or, was she a "willing convert"--or a grudging one?  


John Forester, in Effective Cycling (probably the best cycling book I read during my formative years) says frankly that one of his marriages broke up, in part, over her lack of interest in cycling and, as a result, one of the qualities he sought in  a prospective partner was her willingness to share his passion for cycling.  


A few articles in the magazines of the day--notably Bicycling!--mentioned the same dilemma.  However, the point of view was always the same: that of a high-mileage male cyclist.  This, from a magazine that was edited by a woman !


Later. on club rides, I would hear complaints from women about their male partners' impatience with them--or that those men had splurged on super-bikes for themselves but bought them uncomfortable bikes that handled like shopping carts.  And those men couldn't understand why they couldn't keep up, much less muster enthusiasm!


I have to admit that at in at least one relationship, I was guilty as charged.  Ironically, my last partner before my gender transition was the only one who shared my enthusiasm for cycling.  We did a tours of the Loire Valley and Vermont togethether, and were discussing plans for another when, er, other events intervened.


In my new life, the roles reversed.  I was the cyclist; he had no interest in it at all and couldn't understand why I'd spend an afternoon pedalling to some place to which he could drive in less than an hour.  However, that's not the only reason we're not together.


If you've been reading this blog, you might know that I sometimes ride with two female friends. Before my surgery, I was stronger than them, though not by as much as one might expect.  After my post-surgery layoff, and a shorter hiatus after I developed an infection, they were stronger than I was.  I'm starting to catch up; they have been patient.  (I don't post their photos only because they've asked me not to.  One of them just doesn't want, for professional reasons, to be mentioned on blogs or in any other public forum.  The other is simply shy.)  Somehow I don't recall anything like this in the groups of males with whom I used to ride.  When I look back, I feel that in those relationships, the accent in the phrase "cycling buddy" was on the first word.


Then again, on any Sunday, especially at this time of year, you can see people who are simply buddies who happen to be riding together, like these guys I saw on the Rockaway boardwalk:

Their bikes are what we used to call POS in one bike shop in which I worked.  But they don't know that, and don't seem to care.  Why would they?

Have I Become An Expert? How Did I Do That?

It's really strange to realize that you're an "expert."  Or, at any rate, an elder stateswoman.  Or, at least, experienced.

These days, people ask me, whether in person or by e-mail, questions about some aspect of bicycles or cycling. What's even more ironic is that women--not only young ones--ask me what they should do about or with their boyfriends or husbands.  As if I know!  But that's a topic for my other blog.

Anyway...I think of the times when I was looking for advice about bicycling (and guys!  and girls!) when I was young (which, believe it or not, I was once).  There weren't nearly as many experienced adult cyclists in those days as there are now.  Likewise, there weren't many people who were knowledgeable about bicycles.  Of course, I didn't know that when I first became serious about cycling, but it didn't take me long to find out.

If you rode for a couple of years, you could find yourself walking into a neighborhood bike shop and asking for something they'd never heard of.  Hal Ruzal, a longtime mechanic at Bicycle Habitat, told me about an experience he had during his ride across the USA in 1980.  He was riding with two friends and they'd had a rash of flats. As they were all riding high-quality bikes (Hal was on a Mercian, which he still rides!), their wheels were all 700 C diameter, rather than the 27" that was found on most ten-speed bikes of the time.  And their inner tubes all had Presta valves.  

For those of you who may be relatively new to cycling, Presta valves are thinner than the kind of valves found on cars and motorcycles and on older and heavy bicycles, which are called "Schraeder" valves.  Not only are Presta valves thinner; they also have a stem that must be unscrewed in order to inflate it.  It actually makes a high-pressure tire easier to inflate, and because there's no spring, as there is in a Schraeder valve, there's less to go wrong.

Anyway, Hal described a dilemma he and his buddies faced:  "There wasn't one single Presta valve tube or 700 C tire in the entire state of Kansas!"  A few years earlier, when I was first starting to take long rides and do my own repairs, one didn't have to go to Kansas to find bike shops with such limited selections:  There were plenty in New Jersey, where I was living at the time.  To be fair, there were a few really good shops, and their personnel and I quickly came to know each other.  But most local shops still hadn't progressed beyond kids' bikes or, more tellingly, the notion that bikes were only for kids.

The sad thing is that most of the books in cycling that were available at the time weren't much more useful.  There was no Internet in those days, and although its predecessors existed, they were very limited and you practically had to have a national security clearance to use one.  So people like me were limited to those few-and-far-between experienced cyclists, good shops and books that were available.  

Even the "good" cycling books were full of things that are, at best, outdated (and probably were when they were published) and, worse, laughable or just plain wrong.  One book recommended "yak butter" for breaking in leather saddles.  Does "yak butter" actually exist?  Maybe they have it in Dean and De Luca.  I suspect that whoever wrote that (I've forgotten which book it was in, much less who wrote it.) was partaking of  some Sonoma County gold, and I ain't talkin' about wine, as the early mountain bikers would say.  Or maybe they were simply pulling their readers' legs.

What's really strange, though, is the realization that I know more than the writers of even some of the better bike-related books I read at the time.  I'm thinking now of the first edition of The Complete Book of Bicycling from the late Eugene A. Sloane.  (Scroll down to the bottom paragraph for a very politically incorrect statement!) He was roughly the same age as I am now when the first edition of his book was published in 1970.  I read the book about three years later and, even by that time, some of the information had become dated.  For example, he said that the best derailluers were the Campagnolo Nuovo Record, followed by the Simplex Prestige and the Huret Allvit.  Granted, there weren't as many derailleurs available, at least in the US, as there would be by the time the second edition of the book was published.  But I know that there were others,  some of which shifted better than the Allvit.  

Also, he says that high-quality bikes were almost always made of Reynolds 531 tubing.  Now, I've always liked it, but even in those days, it wasn't the only high-quality tubing.  He mentions Columbus tubing (which he refers to as "Columbia") only in passing.  I've ridden bikes with Columbus tubing (including a Colnago on which I raced) and, while it is stiffer, I always felt that Reynolds tubings (of which all of my Mercians are made) gave a livelier ride, which made them better all-around.    Still, I think that any book that called itself "complete," even in the embryonic days of the bike boom, should have said more about Columbus, not to mention Vitus and one or two other brands of tubing.

Also, he recommends Brooks saddles, but the only model he mentions is the Professional.  I know that the B17 and other models were available, and probably many more cyclists ride B17s than any other model of Brooks.

In fairness, Sloane was trying to sum up, for would-be cycling enthusiasts, what was known and available at that time.  And I realize that a large portion of any book that contains technical information as well as advice about equipment that's available--and conditions that prevail--is bound to date itself after 40 years.  But I also see how limited Sloane's perspective was.

Again, to be fair, I must say this:  If the resources available to me were limited, I can only imagine how much more so they were for Sloane.  And he had even less of a cycling infrastructure, so to speak, than I had.  I would imagine that in his day, in order to learn much about cycling or obtain good equipment, it was all but necessary to live in England, France or some other country where cycling was more ingrained in the daily fabric of life.

Now I can say that more people are knowledgeable about, or at least aware of, various aspects of bicycles and bicycling than were at the time I became serious about cycling more than three decades ago.  People like Sloane are responsible, at least in part, for that.  But it's weird to know that I know more, at least about some things, than the people from whom I learned.  Yet I still feel as if I don't know about anything.

Then again, sometimes I feel the same way about writing, literature--and guys--and girls!  Yet I'm still asked for advice about all of those aspects of life.  And bicycles and bicycling.