Remembering Him As He Remembered His Bicycle

 As a kid I had a dream: I wanted my own bicycle.  When I got the bike, I must have been the happiest boy in (his hometown), maybe the world.  I lived for that bike.  Most kids left their bike in the backyard at night.  Not me.  I insisted on taking mine indoors and the first night I even kept it in my bed.

I omitted the name of this person's hometown because I didn't want to give away his identity just yet.  I'll give you a related clue:  The international airport of his hometown is named after him.

Oh, and he would have been 80 years old today.

He is, of course, John Lennon.  It's hard to believe he's been gone for almost as long as he was alive:  He was murdred on 8 December 1980, two months after turning 40.

That he was shot to death by someone who claimed to be inspired by Catcher In The Rye is a tragic irony on several levels.  For one, Lennon preached peace in his songs and his everyday life. For another, Catcher is as much about youthful alienation as anything else. (Not for nothing was Mark David Chapman  not the first, nor the last, killer to claim the novel as his muse, as it were.) While some of John's, and the Beatle's, songs expressed anger or sadness, they were never disengaged from the lives of the speakers, or the writers or performers, of those songs.

I mean, how alienated can someone be if, late in an  all-too-brief life in which he accomplished so much, he could count getting a bicycle as a child as one of his happiest and most important memories.

Happy birthday and R.I.P., John!

(The airport is officially known as Liverpool-John Lennon International Airport, International Air Transport Association Code LPL.)

A Wrong Turn And A Good Man

I've cycled under, around and by the new Kosciuszko Bridge any number of times.  I've admired its light show, through all of the colors of the rainbow.  But I hadn't actually crossed the bridge's walkway/pedestrian path.

Until last night.  Actually, I pedaled about half of it.  I followed 43rd Street and made what I thought was the turn onto the path. 

Instead, I found myself on the shoulder of the roadway.  That might not have been so bad if the speed limit were less than the posted 45 MPH:  the same limit posted for the rest of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a.k.a. Interstate 278.

No drivers pulled over to the shoulder.  But I could see that it ended with the first exit, where a steep off-ramp snakes its way down to Meeker Avenue in Brooklyn.  For once, I actually hoped a cop would stop me.  Even if I got a ticket, I figured, at least I'd be riding in a patrol car down to the street or the precinct.

That wasn't an appealing prospect.  So I stopped about halfway across the bridge and started to hoist my bike over the four foot-high concrete barrier that separates the shoulder from the path.  An Indian man was walking in the opposite direction, with his wife.  He grabbed the right fork and seat stay, boosted my bike and set it down on the path.  Then he reached for my hand, but I was able to climb over.

I thanked the man.  "No problem, ma'am.  Be safe."  His wife smiled.

A Discount, Because "They're Owed"

 When Willie Mays played stickball with the boys in his neighborhood--Harlem--the media spun it as a story about his love of kids, and how they loved him.

While they certainly had affection for each other, the real reason "The Say Hey Kid" was hitting and catching what those kids hit and threw wasn't that the Polo Grounds, then the Giants' home field, was only a few blocks away.

Rather, he was on those upper Manhattan streets because, even with all his celebrity, he couldn't live anywhere else:  Realtors in other neighborhoods, or other towns, wouldn't rent or sell to him, not because they were Brooklyn Dodger fans, but  because he's black.

Although New York didn't have Jim Crow laws, there was nothing to stop them  from such practices--or to charge a black buyer more than they'd charge a white client.

While it's not possible to change the past, some people are trying, in the ways they know how, to make amends.  Grant Petersen, president and founder of Rivendell Bicycle Works, is one such person.

He's offering "reparations pricing" on some of the company's bikes and frames.  In a way, it's a revival of a practice Rivendell engaged in for two years until the COVID epidemic:  Black customers were offered discount for purchases in the company's Walnut Creek, CA store.  Starting on Monday, 12 October, that discount will be offered on select bikes, nationwide.

Petersen's response to those who object that some customers will "pretend to be black" is, in essence, "I don't care."  He's offering the discount to Black customers, he says, "not because it's a nice thing to do" but because "they're owed."

I'm not surprised that he's getting backlash about this:  Some folks believe that others "deserve" similar discounts for all sorts of reasons, such as being first responders.  I don't disagree with them, but Petersen says that he's trying to keep things "simple."  How simple it will be to identify Black customers, I don't know.  But I respect him for trying to achieve some measure of justice in some segment of the world.