Safety For Whom?

The Fake Tan Führer is preparing for the Washington DC Cherry Blossom festival in his own inimitable ways.

First he said possibly the most ignorant and insensitive thing any US President has ever said to a Japanese Prime Minister. Then the Federal Highway Administration, US Department of Transportation and the National Park Service were about to remove a bike lane along 15th Street, near the National Mall—until a lawsuit stopped the , at least temporarily.

The lane, which serves about 4000 cyclists daily, was installed in 2021. Since then, according to DC officials, crashes have decreased by 46 percent and cyclists’ injuries by 91 percent. But the agencies in question claimed they were preparing to remove it in the name of “safety”—for those who are driving to the Festival.

(Oh, and while ordering bike lane removals, insulting allies and bombing a country without knowing why, he found time to issue the most vile statement I can recall from any public official.) 

Why I Rode

 This, on a Friday afternoon, in one of winter’s last moments:

I mounted Tosca, my Mercian fixed gear bike for a ride I needed to do for no other reason that I needed to do it.  Perhaps it had to do with the changing season: My ride took me to, among other places, a spot I reached in May, on the same bike:

I took that photo from a somewhat different angle,  but from the same street, the aptly named Cliffside Drive in Yonkers.

Then, in the middle of Spring, the lush trees and fog made for a lovely sight. On the other hand, those (mostly) same trees wove a wizened fractal pattern against the kind of blue sky and dark scrim of clouds on the horizon one sees only after a long, cold season.

So, since I am a self-indulgent writer, you, dear reader, may be forgiven for thinking that I “read” something about my life into seeing what I saw the other day, especially in comparison to what I saw last Spring.

Well, there hasn’t been a life-changing event recently—at least since my Japan trip— but I feel that this not-quite-finished winter has highlighted the passing of time, at least for me.  As far as I know, I am still in Midlife because I don’t know when my life will end. 

So what brought on thoughts of future becoming past? The seemingly endless, brutal (at least by the standards of this part of the world) Winter certainly has had something to do with it.  But something else—a dream about someone I hadn’t thought about in decades brought me to Google and an “In Memoriam” page for my high school class’s upcoming round-number-year reunion.

I looked up that classmate, whom I didn’t know well, but whom I could count as a friendly acquaintance. I couldn’t find an obituary or any other information about her death—or life since we graduated—because she had an extremely common name. She might’ve married and taken her spouse’s name, but I couldn’t even find any such account.

Was she recently claimed by one of those diseases that takes increasing numbers of people as they age? Or did she die, like another classmate, not long after we graduated in a motor vehicle crash? I hope someone, whether a jealous ex or some random stranger—whether in gang colors or another country’s uniform—didn’t kill her over so some conflict that would or could not be resolved.

You might think she’s the girlfriend I wish I’d had.  You would be at least partially right. Had I been less socially inhibited than I was, I might’ve known her better. She wasn’t beautiful, but she was what someone I knew would’ve called “presentable “:  in good shape (she was a basketball player) and always (as I remember) well put-together.  Most importantly, at least for me, she was (or seemed to be) the most intelligent kid in my school and had a sense of herself that I completely lacked at the time.

Perhaps I was riding for her.

Where Have This Bike—And Its Rider—Been?

 What is an occupational hazard of browsing sites like eBay and Craigslist? Distraction. That is to say—especially with algorithms and AI making suggestions—it’s so easy to fall into to a “rabbit hole” and find yourself looking at things that may be only peripherally, if at all, related to what brought you to the site in the first place. 

Looking at bicycle-related items, which is the reason for much of my browsing, is especially hazardous:  I can spend hours gazing at bikes, parts and accessories, especially if they are old or unused.

Today this beauty caught my eye:

It might have been a custom build. In any case, it looks like a quality machine:  the frame’s workmanship and construction chrome finish look nice and the parts seem to be high- or medium-high class for their time.

The person (I assume it wasn’t AI) who wrote the description said “a friend” raced the bike in “the early 1960’s.” That seems plausible to me, given what I know about bikes from that period. But it’s not just the bike or some of its rarely-seen-today parts, like the Altenburger derailleurs (the front is a dead-ringer for the Campagnolo Valentino “matchbox” design) that linger in my mind.

Six decades have passed since the early 1960’s.  The world is a different place today. Where has that bike been during those years?  Has anyone besides the “friend” ridden it?  Even more to the point (call me morbid) I wonder whether that “friend” is still alive and what he (I’m guessing he, like most racers of the time, was male) did after racing on that bike.  Did he continue racing, or riding at all, on another bike? Or did he “hang it up” after getting a 9-to-5 job and starting a family? Perhaps he turned his attentions to another sport because, at least in the US, there was even less support for cycling than there is now.

That bike definitely has a story!