On the Bike

I've bought a bike. I am Woman. Biking Woman.

Really sore Biking Woman.

Good lord. Amazing what happens to one's post-50 body when one does little to move that body (blame the foot surgery) for several months.

Still, aching thighs and sore butt and all, I'm feeling good. (Even though I meant to buy a moderately priced old lady bike and instead shelled out an astounding, horrifying, yay downright embarrassing amount of money for Le Ultra Light Totally Cool Sleekly Silver Moderny Metallic old lady bike. All our retirement funds now ride on this bike.)

You see, I used to ride a bike. A 1970s bright blue ten-speed. I worked all summer at Moy's Chinese Carry-Out to earn the money to buy that bike. I faithfully oiled and greased it. I conquered the frontage roads of west suburban Chicago on that bike. And then, in graduate school, I realized one of my deepest dreams: I became a city cyclist. All over the North Side and downtown Chicago, I dodged taxi cabs and behemoth buses, streaked through red lights, careened across sidewalks and onto the lakefront bikepath, sped through clusters of tourists and lost pods of Cubs fans, and pedaled like fury past the Juneway Jungle, a notorious gang hangout on my way home to my studio apartment in Rogers Park. I was young and life was good and Chicago was amazing and the future was wide open. I have never been so happy as I was on that bike in that city.

And now I'm middle-aged and life is complicated and Baton Rouge ain't Chicago and the future is all hemmed in by the past and the present. I have spent much of the last two decades learning to negotiate happiness in the midst of chronic headaches and bouts of clinical depression.

But I can still ride a bike.

And--pedalling in the lowest gear, at a pace barely able to keep the bike upright--I remember what it was like to feel, to feel, goddamn, to feel like me.