Seeing One of My Old Bikes, Perhaps, Again

It was probably a good thing that I was in a hurry.  Why on a Saturday, you ask?  Well, I was running late because I slept late.  


I'd volunteered to be on a panel in a discussion at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  Silly me.  I gave up a ride on one of the best days we're likely to have for a while for the privilege of doing something I'm not crazy about in one of my least favorite places in New York City, if not the world.


Anyway... After I parked Marianela on 35th Street, just off Fifth Avenue, I turned the corner toward the GC-CUNY entrance.  About the best thing I can say about GC-CUNY--and the only thing that would ever tempt me to go to school there again--is that there are decent bike racks in front of the building.


On one of them was propped and locked a bike that, for a moment, made me--as Kurt Vonnegut said in Breakfast of Champions--woozy with deja vu.  I didn't photograph it, but I found an image of a bike just like it:

It's a Schwinn Continental from 1971 or 1972.  I can date it that closely because of the color:  Schwinn called it "Sierra brown;" it's sometimes referred to as "root beer brown."  The following year, the bike was available in a redder shade of brown.  I don't recall what Schwinn's catalogue copy called it.


As you've probably guessed by now, I had the "Sierra" or "root beer" brown Continental.  I bought it early in my freshman year of high school for the princely sum of $96.  My parents thought it was an absolutely insane amount of money to spend on a bike.  Little did they--or I--know what I was getting into!


The so-called "bike boom" of the Seventies was picking up steam then.  As I recall, I went to four different local shops that June, around the time school let out.  All were sold out and subsequent shipments from Schwinn were already spoken for.  None of the shops thought they could have a bike for me before November.  So imagine my delight when one shop--Michael's, on Route 35 in Hazlet, NJ (next to a drive-in movie theatre)--got a shipment a month earlier than promised.  And, yes, there was one bike on which nobody had dibs.  "As long as you don't mind this color," the shop's owner said, a bit condescendingly.


In my high school--and, apparently, most others--most kids got the Continental in a lemon yellow, or the Varsity in a shade of dark bottle green.  They were fine colors, but I was taken with the brown:  It was more elegant, with a golden-bronze undertone, than the photo in this post depicts.  Without hesitation, I plunked down the cash I'd earned from delivering newspapers.


Even though the bike came a month earlier than promised, I had to wait about three months:  a near-eternity for a kid entering adolescence. Now that I think of it, I waited almost as long for that Schwinn as I did for at least one custom frame I've ordered!  


Schwinn referred to the Varsity and Continental as "lightweight" models, though either one weighed about twice as much as my Mercian road bike, on which I made no effort to save weight.  Those Schwinns even weighed about ten pounds more than Marianela weighed when she was new, and she was even a couple of pounds heavier than her competition, which included the Peugeot U08, Raleigh Grand Prix and Motobecane Nobly.

Yes, the Continental was a tank.  (So was the Varsity.)  I'll bet mine is still out there somewhere.  Maybe it's still being ridden.  Hey, for all I know, the one I saw today might've been mine!

Cycling Professor Didn't Ride Today

It pains me to admit this:  On a lovely, if rather chilly, fall day, I didn't cycle to work.


I took the train instead.  It bought me time, of which I haven't had nearly enough, to look at some students' papers and to review a lesson.


Yes, the colleges were open, even though it's Veteran's Day. 


Here's a video of a cycling professor:  http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5251769227304946424 

Autumn Light In The Darkness

Tonight, during my ride home from work, I cut through Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.  It's most famous as the site of two Worlds' Fairs (The Unisphere was built for the second), the US Open stadium and the setting for parts of Men In Black.  Even on a night as chilly and windy as tonight has been, people walk, run, cycle or otherwise transverse the park, and it's heavily patrolled.  


Anyway, Marianela, my LeTour, wanted to stop under this tree:

She knows a photo op when she sees one.  "Do I look autumnal, or what?" she intones.  Yes, she does, even in her battered condition.

I'm Not A Purist, But...

I've seen trust-fund kids wearing Mao and Che T-shirts--which, when you think about them, are a bit oxymoronic.  Perhaps that's not as much a contradiction as having or pursuing tenure while professing Marxism.  (I guess my ex's family, who escaped from Castro, still influences me after all!)  And some genius thought that a song about the apocalypse was just the thing to sell cars.  I love the song (and most others by the artist who wrote and sang it); I just thought it was odd to hear in a VW commercial.


So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised to see a porteur-style rack on the front of a "hipster fixie."  I wish I could've taken a photo of it.  But almost as soon as I saw it, the bike's owner unlocked it and bolted down Broadway.  Even if I'd had enough time to take a photo, I wouldn't have been able to take a very good photo, as I didn't have my camera with me.  


But it was quite the sight:  all neon colors, except for the flat black rack on the front.


I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.  Some "hipster fixies" are actually used for transportation, and even to haul stuff, although they're not the best bikes for the purpose.  And, within a certain segment of the population, it's hip to have a porteur rack.  Still, the combination doesn't seem right.


Mind you, I am  not a purist, at least not about most things.  When I realized how silly and futile it is to preserve racial purity, which is a fiction anyway, I lost whatever desire I had to uphold homogeneity.  


All right, I'll admit to being a purist about a few things.  I still don't think that pineapple belongs on pizza or chocolate chips in bagels.  (Actually, that's the New Yorker in me.)  And, all other things being equal, I'd rather mount merrie olde English Brooks saddles and hang equally merrie-olde Carradice bags on my even-more-merrie-olde-English Mercian frames.  But if you looked at my bikes, you'd see that, even though they have lugged steel frames, they're not entirely "retro," which is something I've never tried to make my bikes.


Still, I'm trying to wrap my mind around the idea of a hipster fixie with a porteur rack.

Bike Porn and Stuff I See From My Bike

I know that some cyclists' blogs include "bike porn."  I don't know that mine does.  If I have any kind of porn in this blog, I'd say that it's of land- and sea-scapes, skylines and people who may or may not have known that I photographed them.  


Perhaps the following photo doesn't qualify as any of the kinds of porn I've described.  But I did take some sort of perverse pleasure in taking it:

Aside from the actual or non-porn, there are things I see.  I'm trying not to turn this blog into Stuff I See When I'm Riding My Bike, but it may be going that way in spite of my efforts.  Here's an example of the genre, specifically something I saw yesterday:

To take a photo of this car without the light pole in it, I would have had to risk being flattened by the traffic.  I want to be skinnier than I am now, but that's not the way I had in mind.


At first glance, I thought I was looking at a Renault that had been left on a radiator.  Or, at least the front had been left there.  I rather liked the color--a shade of orange rather like a dusty vermilion.

Now, what the car was doing in front of a service station in Glendale, Queens, I'll never know.  I know that there are Polish and Albanian communities nearby, but not very many Romanians, as far as I know.  (Where are there very many Romanians outside of Romania?)  Even if Queens were full of emigres from Bucharest, I doubt there are very many who would have taken the trouble--or had the means--to bring a Dacia from their native land.


I did some quick research (translation:  I read a Wikipedia page) and learned that Dacia was founded during the 1960's with assistance from Renault.  Hmm...Romania gave France one of its best twentieth-century playwrights (Eugene Ionesco) and the French started their auto industry.  Who got the better of that trade?


Anyway, Dacia are still making cars.  In a not-too-surprising twist of fate, Renault bought the company.  The French automaker saw a growing market in the former Communist-bloc countries, and believed that Romania would make a good base of operations for their incursions into that market.  (Renault also makes cars in Turkey, among other places.)  


Now, while I'm out riding my bike and filling my brain with stuff that I'll turn into pointless ruminations, other people are slaving away over hot grills.

I've mentioned these guys on other posts in this and my other blog.  They make a chicken-and-rice platter to die for.  I'm not the only one who feels that way:  Once again, they won the "Vendy" award:

All I can say is that in the majority of the world, and through the majority of history, art is and has been utilitarian.

Cycling The November Sky

Here's what makes a November sky different from its October counterpart--or, for that matter, what we think of as a "fall" or "autumn" sky, or what stretches above and in front of us at any other time of year. The clouds are exactly that--clouds.  Even as they shift across the sky and reveal patches of blue backlit by the sun, like a skylight in a Romanesque cathedral, they fill the sky in layers, to the point that they seem to become the sky itself, and to define not only the light, but the wind and chill that come from it.


However, there is absolutely no threat of rain, or any other kind of precipitation.  One can feel just as confident of cycling under this sky as among Shakespeare's "darling buds of May" and not having one's skin moistened by anything that wasn't within his or her own body.  (Whether or how much one sweats depends, of course, on one's conditioning and the strenuousness of the ride.  Mine today wasn't very. )  The best thing about cycling under these conditions, at least to me, is that the light is nothing more or less than that:  it's not the glaring sunlight that taxes light eyes and fair skins (like mine) and it's not diffuse or "painterly," as much as I appreciate and even enjoy that sort of illumination.


This is the sort of light that makes the things--like foliage--that were described with "fall" as prefixes attached to them in October become autumnal in the truest sense of that word.

This may seem odd to some of you, but I find none of this depressing.  In fact, I quite enjoy it.   Now I'm going to sound like exactly the Europhile (or, more specifically, Francophile) snob some of the people with whom I grew up suspected me of being, or having become.  I think that autumnality or autumnalness (OK, if Sarah Palin can compare herself to Shakespeare, surely you can indulge me in this!)  is not much respected, much less valued or celebrated, in American culture.  I suppose it has to do with the notion that this country is supposed to be a place where one can start over and re-invent one's self, and its attendant value of youthfulness and novelty.  The mature sexuality of French or Italian women or the ironic sense of the English--or, for that matter, the ability to accept life on its own terms while questioning one's self that seems to be part of a Germanic way of seeing--is not valued in the same way in America as that of youthful effusiveness and ebullience.


The quality of autumnalness I'm describing is what you might see in western New England if you get off Route 7, or if you take the back roads of the Adirondacks or the routes departmentales of the Vosges.  I have done all of those things, on my bicycle; perhaps having done them in my youth shaped, in some way, my attitudes about cycling and much else in my life.


Will it lead me to be like this couple?:

They say that in the spring a young man's fancy turns to love.  As if I would know about such things!  But at this time of year, an older man's and, ahem, woman's fancies turn to...wait, do they have fancies?   And if they do, will they be realized under this sky?:

I suspect that some of mine will be.  However, I am sure that I will continue to encounter them, as I did today, from my trusty steed for all seasons:

In The Family

Got up late this morning to more rain.  Still felt sleepy throughout the day.  I have an excuse:  lack of REMs during the past three days.  Hopefully, I'll feel better and will be on my bike tomorrow.


I was just "flipping" through some photos I took.  Nobody'll confuse my work with that of Henri-Cartier Bresson, but I have a couple of pictures I like.  Here's one I took a couple of weeks ago when I was riding on the Rockaway Boardwalk:

It was interesting to see the two boys with their mother.  A woman I knew--a former co-worker--who used to live out that way sometimes rode with her daughters along that boardwalk.  I accompanied them a couple of times; I enjoyed the company of the mother and her daughters.  And, they turned out to be better cyclists than I'd anticipated.  


I can recall a few other times when I've seen mothers riding with daughters, or with their husbands and kids. However, I don't think I've ever seen a woman cycling with her boys, but not her husband or daughters, if she had them.  On the other hand, when I've seen boys on tricycles or bicycles with training wheels, the adult who was watching over them was a female--usually the mother, from what I could tell.  I've seen fathers or other adult males riding with young boys, but never accompanying or supervising them as the woman in the photo did.  


As I remember, my mother and grandmother took me to the park or watched over me as I toddered along the sidewalks in our neighborhood.  Those memories are sunny.  That's most likely because we went out only on nice days.


But neither they nor my father, or any other relatives, rode with me--at least as best as I can recall.  To be fair, almost no adults rode bikes in those days, at least in the US.  And, as I now realize, my parents may not have had enough money to buy bikes for themselves.  After all, the bikes I rode as a kid were gifts or hand-me-downs.  Worst of all, they were very busy, and thus very tired, so much of the time.


How involved were your family members in your childhood and adolescent cycling experiences?

To Ride or Not To Ride To Work In The Cold Rain

I woke up very early this morning, as I have been on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  Although it was warm in my apartment, I could feel the chill in the air outside my window as I heard the rain thumping against the awning next door.  


Riding in the rain is one thing.  Riding in rain and cold is another.  Starting to ride in the rain and cold is less appealing still.  I realized there is yet another category for the kind of rain we had today:  grayness, almost pure grayness, dropping through the chilled air and bringing down brightly colored leaves that are turning have turned into shades of rust, and soon will return to ashes and dust.


If I'd been on my bike as the day broke, I suppose it all could have been pretty, if in a rather melancholy way.  I could have worn my raingear and changed clothes at work.  But I decided not to.  For one thing, with the health problems I've had recently, I didn't want to take any unnecessary risks.  For another, it simply wouldn't have been a whole lot of fun, especially in a couple of places where the drivers can be pretty whacky.  Why do agressive risk-takers become even more aggressive and live even more dangerously when the rain slicks the roads.  At least, they seem to.  

In the end, though, I simply don't care to start riding under the conditions I saw this morning, and throughout the day.  It's one thing if I get on the bike when I know that there's a risk that I'll encounter bad weather.  Sometimes I'll take that chance.  But to start riding in the kind of weather we had today is simply not too enjoyable and, frankly, isn't going to make a big difference in my conditioning, such as it is right now.

Typical Commute--And Commuter?

Sometimes I'm happy to have an early a.m. class.  Those sometimes are almost always on days when I pedal to work.  Now I'm on my bike just before sunrise; soon I will be getting in the saddle in the dark.  Until then, I can enjoy sights like this:

I saw tree from the corner of my eye as I turned from the cinderblock sprawl of Lefrak City onto a side street in Corona.  Yes, as in "the Queen of Corona," which Paul Simon immortalized in "Me and Julio Down By The Schoolyard."

A student told me that the ride to work brings out my "glow."  Another student--who's not in one of my classes now--captured me as I was ready to start riding home:

The parked bike is the Pinarello cyclo-cross bike I've mentioned in a previous post.  I've seen it every time I've ridden to my second job.  

It has Mavic Cosmic wheels, Paul cantilever brakes and an XTR crankset and derailleurs:  not what one normally sees in a college's bike rack.


Then again, some would argue that I'm not the typical commuter who parks in a rack like that one.

November Cycling

Today's the first of November.


This is the month that separates the committed cyclists from the rest.  People who pedal once or twice around the park every other weekend usually call it a season about now.  At least, that's what they seem to do in Northern Hemisphere locales that have four discernible seasons.


Yesterday I noticed there were fewer cyclists on the roads and Greenway than there've been on most Sundays during the past few months.  That isn't too surprising:  It was a chilly, windy day, though it was lovely, if in a rather austere way.


Although it was Halloween--the last day of October--in cycling terms, it was more of a November day.  That, for me was part of what I enjoyed about cycling yesterday.


Of course, no month is more beautiful than October.  Perhaps May or June could be said to be as lovely, if in entirely different ways from the month that just passed.  Cycling--or doing nearly anything else outdoors--in  October is a feast for the senses.


On the other hand, November grows grayer and more wizened as it proceeds.  Colors fade into shades of ashes and as trees are stripped of their leaves, their branches grow darker and splinter.  Somehow, though, they endure like the coats the old and the poor wear through another season.


Someone who continues cycling this week, this month, will probably continue to some time just before Christmas.  And anyone who continues cycling after that will probably still be on his or her bike in February.


By then, even they--we-- will be ready for another season, having cycled forward from the light of the gray November tableau.