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The road meanders with the shoreline, past sailing ships and a museum devoted to their history. I try to remember the difference between a sloop and a schooner; is it the number of masts? The slant of the sails? Sean's father used to remember with us when we were young, his days racing sloops on Lake Michigan with only sail power and the magical skills of docking a sailing ship without a motor.

This is the way I ride. Memories churn into my quadriceps, pumped into my blood, thoughts move from synapse to muscle twitch and the memories tied to a place, or smell or the feel of a cool breeze, or the rot of fish in the morning, seep into my consciousness.

A seagull and I think of reading my mother's copy of Jonathan Seagull for the first time when I was ten, the year Christopher crystalized into the essence of who he is now. 1974, the month of June, on the 18th, the year, month and day I first became aware of my mortality and all its ramifications. I suppose the seagull was a part of that, a questioning of 'going along' with the flow of time and expectations. I closed the door of  our room, my brother absent somewhere, and stared at the ceiling.

Why was it that time seemed sometimes to move fast and sometimes slow?

It wasn't linear after all. I thought about that. Then a fearful thought grabbed me: I was ten and I'd already lived a seventh of my life. What had I accomplished?  A seventh of an ice cream cone was a significant thing; my life was being consumed unconsciously, without intention or purpose. I was being wasteful!

What if I could slow down time and make my life last longer? I knew how it worked in Sr. Rhodilia's math class at St. Mathias; those 45 minutes lasted at least as long as an entire trip to my grandmother's on the west coast. For an hour I made time move slowly and then decided that a life like that might be indefinitely long but not actually worth living. At ten years of age, I decided the best thing to do was to remember how quickly time was passing and, with that awareness, decide to live as fully as possible.

What I knew then as a ten year old was that I was still needing to learn what living fully meant and those milestones came later and much later. Experiments with love and pain, commitment and betrayal, sin and goodness; each step in my life, each friend met along the way, further helped me develop the idea of what it meant to live fully in the few moments that we have.

These thoughts course through my veins and find their expression in the wheels turning. I feel them when I grip the handlebars with my hand and the exquisite pressure in my legs as I lean into the pedals and gain speed.