"Mind if I ride your wheel?"
"No, not at all!"
He didn't realize it's the best--or, at least my favorite--question anyone has asked me in a while. It's as good as "How old are you? Forty?"
We'd been playing "tag" along Cross Bay Boulevard, the road that runs the length of an island in Jamaica Bay between Howard Beach and Rockaway Beach. It's a long (about 4km) flat stretch, which makes almost anyone on a bike feel like a sprinter, at least for a few minutes. The day was sunny, though chilly, and we were buffeted by the winds one expects at this time of year. Still, I think both he and I felt about ten years younger.
Actually, I felt even younger than that. A man--a trim one, who looked like he'd been riding more than I'd been--wanting to draft my wheel. Hey, if he'd asked me, I probably would have pulled him with one hand!
Somehow he looked familiar. He was maybe a centimeter, if that, taller than me and, as I mentioned, trimmer. His dark beard was flecked with gray, and his fair black skin had a few small wrinkles. I'd've guessed him to be close to my own age. That guess would turn out to be correct.
As we talked, I couldn't help but to think we'd met--actually, ridden--together. When I was living in Park Slope, he was living on the other side of Prospect Park, in Crown Heights. Now he lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant. So, naturally, we talked about riding in Prospect Park, and how we both had the "ten lap" rule: Once we could ride that much in the park without much effort--something that would happen around this time of year, maybe a bit earlier--we'd "graduate" to longer rides outside the park,and even outside of Brooklyn or New York City. I had a feeling I'd ridden with him on at least one of those longer rides; he had the same feeling.
He also mentioned that he'd road-raced, around the same time I did. Like me, he quit racing (and I also stopped riding off-road) after turning 40: Although, ironically, I had more strength and endurance than I did 15 years earlier, my wounds weren't healing as quickly as they once did. He also gave that as a reason for not chasing trophies, and other riders.
I rode with him for a couple of hours and, actually, off the route I'd planned to ride. But I didn't mind: Just as I was wondering whether I'd ever get myself into any kind of shape, ever again, he wanted to ride my wheel. And he thought I'd been riding more than he'd been. To be fair, I have to give at least some of the credit to Arielle:
To answer a question you might be asking: He gave me his name (which was familiar) and told me where he works.
No, I didn't go hunting today. Two of my uncles and my maternal grandfather hunted for sport (and food). I cannot imagine myself doing such a thing--unless, perhaps, I were really desperate.
But I digress. You may have noticed a staff propping up the "dog". There are four such decoys or statues or whatever they are in a playground in Fort Totten Park, where I rode today.
The day was a bit colder than normal for this time of year. The wind was to be expected. However, I think it was the sky that made this afternoon feel more autumnal than spring-like.
However, Tosca looks good in any season, if I do say so myself.
The weather this "spring" is nothing like it was at this time last year. Yesterday was the first day since the equinox that the temperature rose above 50F (10C). Plus, we've had various combinations of precipitation, on and off, ever since the official beginning of the season.
Today I got out for a brief ride after an errand. Along Greenwich Street, near the meat-packing district, I spotted this:
These days, it's hardly remarkable to see a bike parked on just about any street in New York. But I wondered about the desert boots (That's what we used to call them back in the day) someone left beside it.
Sometimes I see pairs of shoes left outside the doors of buildings in parts of Brooklyn and Queens. That usually means that the building is a mosque. However, I didn't think that the building behind the shoes--and bike--was used for Islamic prayer services.
Although the "tongue" of the left shoe stuck out, I didn't get the impression that the shoes were abandoned. Still, I had to wonder why they were left next to that bicycle.
I have been cycling, in one way or another, for more than four decades. Now I do not pedal nearly as many miles (or kilometres) as I did "back in the day." But I feel that, in some way, cycling is as much a part of my life now as it was then.
Through all of those years, there was one period when I seriously considered giving up cycling altogether. I was going to keep one bike "for old time's sake" and, perhaps, for errands and transportation. But I thought that my days as a regular rider were going to come to an end.
That time came early in my life as Justine. I really didn't know how, or even whether, I could combine cycling--or, more precisely, my identity as a cyclist (There were years in which I pedaled 360 days and 25,000 or more kilometers!) with the life on which I was about to embark. One reason for that was, frankly, I had practically no idea of what the life on which I was embarking would be like. Oh, I had visions of who and what Justine would be. But, as happens with nearly everyone who undergoes a gender transition, my expectations--and the sort of woman I would become--differed, at least somewhat. Although my therapist, social worker, doctor and other transgender people who were further along in their transitions--or who'd had surgery and were living fully in their "new" genders--told me such a thing would probably happen, I had no idea of what I would become as a woman.
Also, I was trying so hard to be the sort of woman I envisioned at the beginning of my transition that it took me time to realize that it could encompass much more than I imagined at the time--and that, of course, the sort of woman I could, and would, become could be different. I'd entered my transition with ideas of what women in the '40's and '50's were like, which were the ideas to which early transsexuals like Christine Jorgensen conformed, and what the public expected of transsexuals (to the extent that they paid attention to us).
But, perhaps the most important reason why I thought I might not ride anymore was that so much of my cycling had been a means of escape, however temporary. Whether I was pedaling 180 rpm on the Prospect Park loop or hugging the edge of a virage in the Alps--or dodging taxis and giving the one-fingered peace sign to drivers who got in my way--bicycling had always been a means of escape for me. I think now of a friendly acquaintance who was one of the first women to attend her undergraduate college on a track and field scholarship. She has told me that whether she was training on local streets or pumping away during the state championships, she was "running for my life by running from my life". She never would have been able to attend her college without that scholarship, she said. But, perhaps even more important, she says she doesn't know how she would have "survived, in one piece" a childhood that included incest and other forms of dysfunction and disease in her family.
My childhood wasn't nearly as Dickensian as hers. Perhaps I shouldn't say that, for such a comparison may not make any sense: After all, she suffered at the hands of other people, while most of my torment came from within me. Still, I could relate to what she said as much as anything anyone else has said to me. Her running and my cycling had been means of escape, however momentary.
She hasn't run, even for fitness, in more than two decades. She has taken up other sports (including cycling, which is how I know her) and forms of training, but she has not run since the day she was doing laps in the park and "asking myself why," she said.
But I didn't give up cycling because, frankly, I probably have always enjoyed it more than she liked running, and I now have more reasons to continue on two wheels than she does on the training loop. Also, during my second year of living as Justine, I was running errands and shopping after work one Friday. It was a pleasantly cool day in May,and I was still in the blouse, skirt and low heels I'd worn to work that day. I had just come out of a store and was unlocking my bike from a parking meter when a tall black man chatted me up. "Are you European?", he wondered.
"Well, I've lived and traveled there," I explained. "But I'm from here, and I've lived most of my life here."
"You look more like a European woman, getting around on your bike," he said. He confirmed what I suspected, from his accent and mannerisms, that he was born in Africa but had lived much of his life in Europe--specifically, France.
That day I realized that, one way or another, I would probably continue to ride my bicycle in my new life. I would never be the same kind of cyclist I was when I was living as Nick--and, honestly, at that time, I didn't want to be. But I knew that as Justine, a newly-born woman in her 40's, I would be able to ride her bike in my new life--and my job and those stores wouldn't be my only destinations, any more than commuting and store-hopping would be my only rides.
How many poker players are cyclists?
For that matter, how many magicians ride bikes?
Those questions crossed my mind today when I was in a store, shopping for something entirely unrelated, and I came across decks of Bicycle playing cards.
I've seen them before, even though I can't remember the last time I played a card game and don't know the first thing about poker.
Turns out, Bicycle cards are some of the best-known. They have been in continuous production since 1885. Although I have found no information to confirm it, I suspect that the name has to do with the start date: That is around the time bicycling was becoming fashionable. A high-wheeler from that time cost, in today's dollars, more than even the most expensive custom machines made for record attempts and the riders on the wealthy nations' national teams.
In other words, bicycles had the same connotations as a private jet might have today. People rode them to the opera and to art openings. As arduous as they were to ride, nobody would mount a "penny farthing" unless he or she were wearing "proper" attire. And I ain't talkin' about "billboard" jerseys and shorts in lycra!
Apparently, BIcycle cards are available in a variety of configurations, including versions for various card games and large-print cards for people with low vision. However, nearly all Bicycle decks have an "air cushion" finish, which is said to improve their handling and is one of the reasons why they are so favored by magicians and performers who incorporate card tricks into their routines.
The first card in a typical deck is Bicycle's uniquely-styled Ace of Spades. That card played a role its designers probably didn't envision. During the Vietnam War, two American lieutenants wrote to the United States Playing Card Company (the manufacturer of Bicycle cards) and requested decks containing nothing but Aces of Spades. Those officers, and their underlings, scattered those cards around the countryside. Some Vietcong fled at the mere sight of them: They conflated the Ace of Spades with a similar-looking French fortune-telling card that foretold death and suffering. (Vietnam, a.k.a. Indochina, had been a French colony for nearly a century.) Some of the Vietcong also regarded Lady LIberty, which was inscribed on some decks of cards, as a goddess of death.
I'm sure some of them fled on bicycles.
