ode to my bicycles
I sold my bicycle today. The balcony looks emptier.
This is the third bike I've owned. The first was one of the most wonderful gifts I have ever received from my father. It was a single speed child's bike, with a black frame and yellow decals -- to me, in the first grade, it was among the most "big" and "real" things in my life. I did not have to pretend to be content with just the kiddie version of this activity anymore. The adult versions were often both better and worse -- the meals were tastier but involved long and boring conversation, the piano pieces were more beautiful but much harder on little fingers, the reading were more interesting but had such small print and few good pictures. The point was the right--or rite--of participation.
As a precocious child who knew how to use her cleverness to be cute instead of obnoxious, I had many secret disdains for the adult world. Oh, not at all an absolute disdain like the self-importance disguised as clarity of vision in Le Petit Prince -- in fact, that was one of the masks of "childhood innocence" that I was most accustomed to assuming for interpersonal diplomacy. Real adults, not the Antoine de Saint-Exupery variety, did not agree on the meaning of a picture or the course in life one should take. Real children, at least of the girl variety, knew that a drawing is always both snake and hat -- or whatever else the most powerful person in the room at the time, who might well be a toddler in tantrum, saw it as. There was a mess of paths through the Forest of Expectations, and this girl, at least, was a little Machiavellian princess.
But there were precious windows of escape from the tangles of power, love, and strategy. How I envied the narrator of Le Petit Prince his pilot's license! There was no mysterious joy to taming or being tamed to me -- anything that could be tamed, and there was more outside that category than in it, resembled dogs. Be kind, be consistent, and show no fear, and it will in turn become kind, consistent, and trusting -- that was how I tamed most of the adults in my life, at least. To tame and to belong to each other was a good and desirable thing, as needy and necessary as love itself, but it was not, by far, everything. I loved the process of being taught by my father to tame my new bicycle, but that was only one memorable damp Spring afternoon. The real glory came after, during all the times I hurtled through familiar and unknown spaces at a speed that was just a bit superhuman but not quite yet a blur, and did not have to think at all.
That first bicycle went the way of most of our other possessions during immigration -- left behind, probably cherished by some new owner (anything that can be tamed once can be tamed again), or so I'd like to imagine. I spent years of nights imagining my phantom life -- it was the only way I could fall asleep, making believe that when I woke up, I will have returned to my other home, the home that was mine. I did not own another bicycle until college, when an ex-boyfriend bought his then-girlfriend a used bike that she practically never used, and then re-gifted it to me, her roommate (my late high school and college years were like a Woody Allen movie -- you don't want to know). I loved my second bike, too. It, too, expanded my everyday radius, filled my calves with sweet vinegar, and ran breezes into my face. Almost all its gears didn't work, its chain slid off periodically, its brakes left something to be desired, its pale blue paint had chipped and rusted, but again, it was there to stop my thinking, to temporarily lift me off from the territory of love and power and strategy.
Seven years ago I moved to Los Angeles and resolved to live without a car. I bought my third bike myself, and rode its shiny red frame up a steep hill to campus and down a steep hill from campus every school day for two years. No one else in my classes arrived sweaty, with oil stains at their pants' hems, not even my students. It was one more sign of my self-imposed isolation in this simultaneously solicitous and indifferent school and city. My twenty minutes downhill everyday, occasionally twice a day, were my best moments in those years. The rest of me sank deeper into depression, but I remembered how to be unattached when I rode. By the first Spring I had learned to control the bike entirely with my knees -- I habitually took the last curvy but relatively flat mile with my hands stretched out, touching the air, untamed, un-taming.
I bought my first car at the end of my second Spring in Los Angeles. Big and real. I paid for my right to join this city, and am better and worse for the choice. My bike has rarely been ridden since then, and so I sold it to a nice looking psychology student today, with its lock and lights, for $60. It is no longer shiny because I haven't taken good care of it, but it is a good bike. I hope that she will go places with it.
This is the third bike I've owned. The first was one of the most wonderful gifts I have ever received from my father. It was a single speed child's bike, with a black frame and yellow decals -- to me, in the first grade, it was among the most "big" and "real" things in my life. I did not have to pretend to be content with just the kiddie version of this activity anymore. The adult versions were often both better and worse -- the meals were tastier but involved long and boring conversation, the piano pieces were more beautiful but much harder on little fingers, the reading were more interesting but had such small print and few good pictures. The point was the right--or rite--of participation.
As a precocious child who knew how to use her cleverness to be cute instead of obnoxious, I had many secret disdains for the adult world. Oh, not at all an absolute disdain like the self-importance disguised as clarity of vision in Le Petit Prince -- in fact, that was one of the masks of "childhood innocence" that I was most accustomed to assuming for interpersonal diplomacy. Real adults, not the Antoine de Saint-Exupery variety, did not agree on the meaning of a picture or the course in life one should take. Real children, at least of the girl variety, knew that a drawing is always both snake and hat -- or whatever else the most powerful person in the room at the time, who might well be a toddler in tantrum, saw it as. There was a mess of paths through the Forest of Expectations, and this girl, at least, was a little Machiavellian princess.
But there were precious windows of escape from the tangles of power, love, and strategy. How I envied the narrator of Le Petit Prince his pilot's license! There was no mysterious joy to taming or being tamed to me -- anything that could be tamed, and there was more outside that category than in it, resembled dogs. Be kind, be consistent, and show no fear, and it will in turn become kind, consistent, and trusting -- that was how I tamed most of the adults in my life, at least. To tame and to belong to each other was a good and desirable thing, as needy and necessary as love itself, but it was not, by far, everything. I loved the process of being taught by my father to tame my new bicycle, but that was only one memorable damp Spring afternoon. The real glory came after, during all the times I hurtled through familiar and unknown spaces at a speed that was just a bit superhuman but not quite yet a blur, and did not have to think at all.
That first bicycle went the way of most of our other possessions during immigration -- left behind, probably cherished by some new owner (anything that can be tamed once can be tamed again), or so I'd like to imagine. I spent years of nights imagining my phantom life -- it was the only way I could fall asleep, making believe that when I woke up, I will have returned to my other home, the home that was mine. I did not own another bicycle until college, when an ex-boyfriend bought his then-girlfriend a used bike that she practically never used, and then re-gifted it to me, her roommate (my late high school and college years were like a Woody Allen movie -- you don't want to know). I loved my second bike, too. It, too, expanded my everyday radius, filled my calves with sweet vinegar, and ran breezes into my face. Almost all its gears didn't work, its chain slid off periodically, its brakes left something to be desired, its pale blue paint had chipped and rusted, but again, it was there to stop my thinking, to temporarily lift me off from the territory of love and power and strategy.
Seven years ago I moved to Los Angeles and resolved to live without a car. I bought my third bike myself, and rode its shiny red frame up a steep hill to campus and down a steep hill from campus every school day for two years. No one else in my classes arrived sweaty, with oil stains at their pants' hems, not even my students. It was one more sign of my self-imposed isolation in this simultaneously solicitous and indifferent school and city. My twenty minutes downhill everyday, occasionally twice a day, were my best moments in those years. The rest of me sank deeper into depression, but I remembered how to be unattached when I rode. By the first Spring I had learned to control the bike entirely with my knees -- I habitually took the last curvy but relatively flat mile with my hands stretched out, touching the air, untamed, un-taming.
I bought my first car at the end of my second Spring in Los Angeles. Big and real. I paid for my right to join this city, and am better and worse for the choice. My bike has rarely been ridden since then, and so I sold it to a nice looking psychology student today, with its lock and lights, for $60. It is no longer shiny because I haven't taken good care of it, but it is a good bike. I hope that she will go places with it.