Forty six years

Yesterday was my birthday.  The day before, it occurred to me that I was getting older.  Not because of the hard ride my teammates on Colobikelaw put me through on a supposed ‘easy’ day on ‘flat’ roads southeast of Denver.  After three hours of four-man echelons into the wind and chasing down escapees on the hills, it suddenly popped into my brain that thirty years ago I built my first wheel.

I was suddenly old. 

Sixteen years old, riding my bike to a small bike shop on the north side of Milwaukee, in the ‘core’ of the projects on 23rd Street and Fond du Lac Avenue, I had no idea how the decision to apply for a job posted on the board at school would change me and the direction of my life.  A couple of years earlier I had ridden my first century on a Sears Free Spirit ten speed, an abomination of a bicycle.  Made with plumber’s pipe painted a dull mustard and fitted with the lowest tier of components available, it even sported ‘safety’ levers on the brakes.  Riding one hundred miles on it, lap after lap through Whitnall Park for a March of Dimes fundraiser in 1978 did three things.  First it destroyed the bike and launched my experience as a bicycle mechanic, then it showed me the delicious joy of riding for hours on a bicycle.  I was hooked and started racing the next year on a Trek, before Trek was cool.

And it led me to a bicycle shop far away from my semi-suburban home on Milwaukee’s southwest side.  About that same time I remember a story in the Journal about minority numbers in the different areas of the city.  Our area, with a population of 10,000 had exactly three minority residents.  I rode the city bus (or my bicycle) to my high school every day, a ten mile trip that took me past County Stadium and up through Pigsville.  Marquette High was on 35th and Wisconsin Avenue and I never noticed before that every white person on the bus got off there and a crowd of black people stood waiting to get on.  After two years, I rode the bus past Wisconsin for the first time and it hit me like a brick; I was the only white on the bus.  Years later, I would have the same experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in a small village on the edge of the Kalahari. 

I’ve been led to many places by my bikes.  As I reflect on my life so far, there are few regrets, few lost opportunities to keep me awake with thoughts of what could have been.  Perhaps it’s lingering fatigue from yesterday’s ride, but a sense of contentment is all that I find and a renewed excitement anticipating the time ahead.