Happy (I Hope) New Year

 

From the San Diego Bicycle Club website.

Happy New Year!

In looking for some images appropriate for today, I saw many for the beginning of 2020.  They seem like artifacts from another era. People seemed to have high hopes for the year. (I did, too, if they were tempered by my mother’s passing three months earlier.) I think it had to do, not only with the conditions of the time, but that 2020 just sounded so good:  2020, perfect vision, clear skies ahead.

We all know what happened next.

Now, after two years of COVID-19, the mood is more somber. Most people I know don’t seem to have the hope or optimism they (most of them, anyway) had 731 days ago. Many public events, including the celebration at Times Square, were scaled back or cancelled altogether. But even in my neighborhood and, I suspect, others, there wasn’t as much revelry as one normally witnesses as we usher one year out and another in.

I’m not particularly a U2 fan, but their New Year’s Day song, especially its last couple of stanzas, seems apt today:

And This is How 2021 Ends (Apologies to T.S. Eliot)

So how will you remember this year?  

Whatever the state of the  COVID pandemic, or anything else in the world, I can say that 2021 was better than 2020 in at least a few ways, however small.

For one thing, I didn't have two accidents (here and here) that landed me in an emergency room (one of them to a trauma center), as I did last year.  I guess one of my blessings, if you will, is that they were the only two such accidents in my nearly half-century of dedicated cycling.

For another, I've met a couple of new potential riding partners.  As much as I like to ride alone, I sometimes want someone to share the experience.  And one of those new fellow riders is two years older than I am and took her first rides in four decades--with me.  Lilian is good company and the educator in me finds fulfillment in helping her re-enter the world of two wheels and two pedals.

And last year's first crash, which wrecked Arielle, my Mercian Audax, yielded enough insurance money for me to buy another Mercian frame--La Vande, a custome Mercian King of Mercia constructed from Reynolds 853 tubing and equipped mainly with parts I had in my apartment.  She's a nice complement to Dee-Lilah, my custom Mercian Vincitore Special.

I still wish I could have taken a trip somewhere more than a state or two away. Well, I could have, but even though I am fully-vaccinated, I have been reluctant to get on a bus, train or plane.  That hesitancy has also kept me from doing a few rides that I've done a couple of times in each of the past few years because they involve a ferry ride to connect parts of the trip or a train ride to get me home.  So, I've been doing many of the same rides again and again.  Perhaps, in the coming year, I'll seek out some new routes.

Oh, and Marlee has been at the beginning and end of my rides.  She joins me in ushering out this year, and wishing you good tidings in the new year.

Late Afternoon, Early Winter, End Of Year

Late afternoon.  Early winter. End of the year.

That was today’s ride, down the Brooklyn and Queens waterfront and back.

I lingered a bit at the Long Island City promenades op and piers. I started riding there long before it sprouted glass towers, trendy cafes and young people who might be a little too self-consciously hip for their own good.  

Back then, it was an industrial area where each block, it seemed, showed a different stage of post-industrial decay.  But it felt comfortable, to me anyway, like a sweater that might look a bit tattered but feels right.  One thing that hasn’t changed is that it offers some nice harbor vistas and the best views of my two favorite Manhattan skyscrapers—the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings. I wonder, though, whether we’ll be able to enjoy those  views for much longer:  It seems that developers are building more and more, as tall and as close as possible to those edifices, as possible.

I mean, if they continue to hem it in, nobody will be able to see this, from Long Island City or anywhere else.

 

Still, the ride was a nice ending to a day and a year, at the beginning of winter.