When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. ~H.G. Wells
I have this fantasy where I’m lazily riding my trusty bicycle around town, the artificial breeze flirting with my skirt-hem, donating forbidden glimpses of my gartered stockings and lacy undergarments to those observers with good timing. Then, I stop by a roadside fruit stand and sample a juicy peach at the farmer’s urging; possibly because he wants to watch me negotiate the sticky sun-warmed juices, with lewd hopes that his peach will coerce me into sexily licking errant drips here and there. I realize this, blush at the flattery and buy a few to carefully place into my handlebar basket, along with some fresh flowers I found a few miles back, to put in the pretty garage-sale Limoges vase wrapped in the Sunday funnies in there, as well.
This will never happen.
Well, not while I’m lucid. Or while I’m abstaining from huffing electronics duster in a can.
There are several reasons why… first and foremost,
1. I never learned to ride a bike. It just never came up. I was raised in the semi-rural part of a suburb where we had no sidewalks and gravel driveways not conducive to 2-wheelers. My brother (the most fearless person I’ve ever known) learned on the lawn, and rode a used mountain bike we got at the Eddie’s Bike and Cheese Shoppe through the woods, through mud puddles, through garbage piles, through everything under the sun like some kind of late-night-infomercial-wonder-appliance. Not me, no way. There are several sub-factors to this:
a. I’m epically clumsy. I have tripped over nothing and had to get eleventeen stitches for it. Every friend and family member has a unique “favorite fall” story starring me. It’s bad.
b. I’m pretty fat. This is largely due to 1a, but as an awkward kid, I stuck to doing things that wouldn’t embarrass me in public, and as I got bigger, that list grew exponentially to include things like “participating in gym class,” “eating in front of people,” and “talking.” I’m less fat in relation to the general populous nowadays, thanks to High Fructose Corn Syrup and such, but, still… on a bike, I think it would be kind of scary. Unless, perhaps, I could get a sign or something that said, “shut up, I’m working on it, see?” for the fender.
c. I have an irrational fear of broken glass. I am convinced that if I fall on the ground in the city, that I will have thousands of shards of glass enter my blood stream and either give me a whole new strain of hepatitis or secretly make their way into my circulatory system cutting me to shreds internally in a way that even the best coroner would never figure out.
d. Nobody can seem to teach an adult to ride. Helpful hints like, “well, come on, just do it!” or “I dunno, you pedal, you steer, you brake, it’s really easy!” and “it works like a gyroscope,” have been offered to help turn on the ol’ lightbulb – but nothing seems to stick. I mean, it’s supposed to be the easiest thing ever – people say all the time, “it’s just like riding a bike,” to mean “it’s something you just inherently know how to do on instinct.” Unfortunately, defining a thing using that thing as the definition is a loop error that I can’t seem to overcome.
e. I don’t currently have health insurance. Bankruptcy seems an uneven trade for trying to learn to save bus fare.
2. I don’t own a bike. Or safety equipment, or lights, or a handlebar basket, or a messenger bag, or skinny jeans with one cuff rolled way up… Of course, most of that is related to reason #1, but, they’re expensive! And there are so MANY different kinds! And the hipsters at the bike shop chuckle when you say you want one that makes me look like this (with better eyebrows):
And, there are probably other reasons, but that pinup girl is making me forget most of them for now. The thing is, I now live in a city where all the cool kids (and most of the uncool kids) are biking to everywhere, with the added implication that my non-biking basically precipitated the Gulf Oil Spill. You’re welcome. I never liked oysters, anyway. Also, my loving man-friend is urging me to learn to ride with cute little verbal slips like “we should ride our bikes down to the park, it’ll be so romantic!” Wherein, I have to remind him for the ga-millionth time of items #1 and #2 above, and he says something like “oh yeah, oh well. I guess we can get drunk and watch a DVD again.”
So really, if anyone has any pointers… they probably couldn’t hurt. Much.
*image with great courtesy of the guy whose name is scribbled on it, Harvey Somethingorother, who is probably not even reading this.