Rick's Cafe Americain

5/9/07

I have a bad cut on my knee. I hurt it riding my bike over the weekend. I have a bad history with bicycles, so this is par for the course. It all falls under the theme of “Did the person who used the expression “it’s like riding a bicycle” to describe how easy it is to restart an old activity ever ACTUALLY take a long hiatus from riding a bicycle?”

I rode my bike a lot when I was a kid. Of course I did. I was a kid. (If you didn’t ride a bicycle as a child, your childhood was probably unbearably sad.) Then I kind of stopped riding. I went to school on a bus and anything else I did was pretty much close enough to walk or far enough to drive.

After a few years of not riding, I got jealous of all of the people in college who zipped back and forth to class while I found myself slowly trudging everywhere, so I pulled my bike out of the garage and brought it up to Ithaca. During my first week of riding, as I was struggling up a hill, I was passed by a woman pushing a stroller.

The bicycle went back into the garage.

14 years later I met Carrie, who rides or walks everywhere. One night, when I had to go home because I didn’t have work clothes at Carrie’s apartment, Carrie volunteered her bike to me. For some reason it didn’t occur to me that a trip from a neighborhood called “Park SLOPE” to one named “Prospect HEIGHTS” was not the ideal maiden voyage. It was a mile and a half, uphill, over the streets of Brooklyn - which are roughly like downtown Fallujah. It the intervening 14 years I had completely forgotten how one cushions ones balls from the shock and by the time I arrived home, I was sweating like I just came in from a thunderstorm, heaving like I was having a
heart attack and walking like I just rode a bicycle for a mile and a half without any shock absorption.

The next time I needed to go home for a change of clothes, I walked.

3 years later, Carrie finally convinced me to get a bike so we can ride together. I like it. It is red and shiny and maybe I’ll get a bell for it, just to recapture my youth. This past weekend, however, I was using it to ride to the softball fields in Prospect Park. As I was riding in the park, I saw that I was going to have to make a left turn into a steep incline up. So I leaned forward, pressed hard to make the charge and fell over.

I repeat, I fell off of my bicycle. I didn’t hit anything or anyone. I wasn’t avoiding a dangerous object. I FELL. OFF. MY. BICYCLE.

I have been limping since Sunday and have not been on the bike since.