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.
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.
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.
