The Second- Best Bike I Ever Lost

Vera is once again up and running.  She got me to work today.  I definitely count my blessings that I lost only a seat and post, not the whole bike. 

I am making a couple of other modifications to her and, when they're done, I'll show her in her new glory.

Speaking of theft:  Yes, I have had bicycles stolen.  Four, in fact.  Two were "beaters" and I actually got one of them back after the owner of one of the shops in which I worked spotted it when he was riding home. However, another bike that was stolen from me was a high-quality, nearly new,  road bike:  a 1994 Bridgestone RB-2.

I bought it as a "leftover" at a substantial discount the following year.  Most Bridgestones--at least the higher-end models--sold out in most years; I considered myself lucky to get one that was more or less the right size for me.  I didn't "need" another bike, as I had high-quality road and mountain bikes, but I got a deal that was simply too good to pass up. 

It came in a blue-green (I thought it was more blue) metallic finish that I liked, although I would have liked the plum metallic, the other color choice offered that year, even better.  However, for the price I paid, I wasn't about to be picky.

I put a pair of Michelin 700 X28C cyclo-cross tires and rack on it with the intention of making the bike my commuter and winter road ride.  That plan worked for about three months, if I remember correctly.  At the time, I was teaching at the New York City Technical College (now the New York City College of Technology).  The good news was that it was less than five minutes, by bike, from the Park Slope apartment in which I was living.  However, the bad news was that it was in what was still a high-crime area of downtown Brooklyn.

The college consisted of a couple of fairly grimy concrete and steel buildings that sucked up all of the soot from nearby factories and the cars and trucks entering the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges.  Bicycles weren't allowed inside any of the buildings.  But nearly every day, I bought coffee and something to eat from a truck that stood just outside the main entrance.  The owner told me to park my bike at the parking meter nearest his truck, plainly within his sight. I did that for a couple of months.

Well, one day, he was sick and someone else--a nephew, I think--manned the truck.  And, after teaching eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds where to put commas in their sentences, I walked over to the truck, only to find my bike gone.

The young man in the truck claimed to see nothing.

I'd been using the best lock Kryptonite made at the time.  They paid the full retail cost of the bike, minus the deductible.    After another paycheck or two, I could have bought another RB-2, even at the regular price.  The only problem was that they weren't available any more.  It was made in Japan and the dollar lost a lot of value against the yen, making the bike, and others built in Japan, much more expensive in the US than they had been. So Bridgestone and other Japanese bike makers (like Miyata and Panasonic) simply stopped exporting to the US.  (Other Japanese makers, like Fuji, outsourced their manufacturing to Taiwan and China.)

Because I already had a high-end road bike, a nice track bike and a pretty good mountain bike, I simply used the latter bike for commutes and saved up for a nicer mountain bike, as I was becoming a fairly serious off-road rider.  But I missed the RB-2:  It was a sweet ride and the time I had it marked the first time in my life I had more than one good road bike.

Getting On My High Wheel

Has anybody out there ridden a high-wheeler (or, as they were called in England, "penny-farthing")?  Every once in a while, I think I'd like to ride one.  


Of course, there's one logistical problem:  finding such a bike.  And then I'd have to get a pair of bloomers.  I suppose I could ride in a short skirt, but somehow that wouldn't be in the spirit of riding a bike like the one in the photo.

New Year's Day Rides

There are cyclists who ride on New Year's Day and don't mount their bikes again until the Spring.  I once rode with some of them.  We began at six in the morning and were done by noon or thereabouts.  


I guess I don't have to mention that I was unattached and didn't drink the previous night.  However, I did stay up to watch the ball drop on Times Square.  I don't know when I went to bed, but I know I didn't get more than a couple of hours of sleep.  Still, somehow I managed to do a century (in miles, not a metric century), which included a few short but fairly steep climbs, to Bear Mountain and back.  


The funny thing is that all of us who did that ride were in really good condition, and most of us were young and male, yet it didn't have quite the same competitive spirit one finds on rides like it. n fact, it had less egotism among the riders than almost any ride I did with male riders before my transition.  I guess we gave each other "props" simply for being there, even though we knew that some of us wouldn't see each other again for at least another two months.


My ride today was nothing like that. For one thing, I woke up later and ate something like a real breakfast.  And I made and received a few "Happy New Year" phone calls, which I avoided on the morning of my long-ago ride. And, well, I'm not in the kind of shape I was in back then.  However, it was a clear, mild day, and there was--unsurprisingly--little traffic anywhere.


Plus, I stopped to check out a few things along the way.

This house is about a mile from my apartment.  I saw two a man, a couple and a woman walk by with their kids.  None wanted to leave.  I didn't, either:  How often does one see a miniature village, Santa's workshop and a toy store all in one.  I can't hope to portray the attention the owners of this house paid to detail, but I will show you some of the more enchanting parts of their display:

This is the part right above where I propped Tosca.  She couldn't take her eyes off this place, for reasons visible in the next photo:

While there was no haze in this part of the display, another part had its own misty marvel:

Now, if your idea of a great view doesn't run to castles, you might like what I saw when I left and crossed the RFK Bridge:

The blue domes adorn a Greek Orthodox temple.  Seeing them in that landscape of residential houses reminds me, somewhat, of a particular view from the hill of le Sacre Coeur de Montmartre in Paris.  Looking down from that hill, you see block after block of fin de siecle and Beaux Arts townhouses and apartment houses, nearly all of which stand three to six stories high.  That vista is interrupted by the glass and steel planes and chutes of le Centre Pompidou. 


After crossing the bridge, I came face-to-face with a very inquisitive mind:  

I heard him meow as I rode by.  His eyes pleaded with me to stop.  As soon as I got off my bike, he darted to my ankles and rubbed himself around my legs.   I hope that he belongs to someone in one of the nearby houses; he simply does not belong on the street.  I actually picked him up and he curled around my shoulder for a moment before deciding he wanted to follow the laws of gravity.


Isn't it interesting that dogs sometimes chase cyclists, but cats can be fascinated with bicycles?  In a perfect world, they could accompany us on our rides--whether to begin the new year, or to continue a journey.