From almost nothing

BECAUSE I BOUGHT a Nook Color a month ago, it was lying on the bed.

Because it was lying on the bed, a child picked it up and pushed some buttons.

Because he pushed some buttons, he saw a single-player chess app.

Because they didn’t get bored taking turns with the single-player chess app, I bought them a chess set and a chess book.

Because they requested it, they now get a section from the chess book and a game every night at bedtime, instead of a story.

WE RIDE BIKES.

Because we ride bikes, we get up to Isham for the Inwood greenmarket most Saturdays. It’s .6 miles. We wouldn’t walk it, and the subway or bus would cost $9.

Because the boys have a new travel chess set I got them so they could play on the bus after swim class, they brought it today and set it up where kids run around.

They explained the game to a new opponent and attracted an audience of kibitzers.

BECAUSE THEY’RE SO fixated on chess, and because we ride bikes to the Inwood greenmarket, and because bikes engage you with your surroundings instead of isolating you from them, they zeroed in on two men playing chess while we were riding past on Seaman.

CHESS! CHESS! CHESS! CAN WE PLAY!?

Because Inwood has an active Twitter population, I knew one of the players by reputation.

“You can’t play,” I said, “but you can watch.”

“They can play!” offered the man I’d recognized.

So we braked and walked our bikes over.

The men welcomed them, talked to them, challenged them, and taught them the game of Pawns.

They, in turn, cracked one of the men up when I said, “Hey guys, tell him our name for en passant,” and the boys yelled in unison, WHACK ’IM WHILE HE’S RUNNING!

(“I’m running, I’m running—WHACK!” the man riffed, chuckling.)

After two games of Pawns, the boys played chess, with much better kibitzing than they’d had at the greenmarket, and I learned that Sundays, they set up multiple tables for whoever wants to play and actively help kids with the game. I also learned the man I was talking to had ditched his cigarette as the boys came up. They don’t want to teach that. Just chess.

Because it was all so cool, I forgot to take pictures.

Then because the whiny hungry crabbies had arrived, we said thank-you and rode home.

We ride bikes.

I got a Nook Color.

Therefore life has gone in a completely unforeseeable way.

Children’s chess, Sundays 10am–3pm, Seaman and 207. All are welcome.

A Saturday bike video

My Father’s Day present was a gift certificate from Tread. I got a GoPro camera.

We tried it out this weekend.

A maturing relationship with Pyrex

WE HAVE THIS lousy Pyrex saucepan.

It has three problems. The two most obvious are the bileous mulberry hue it casts on food and its passive-aggressiveness in pouring. But those are just physical things. If I loved it, I could get past them; no pan is perfect. But there’s something more subtle, which I find much harder to deal with:

It doesn’t show its emotions.

WE ALREADY KNOW how hard it is to know what’s going on inside other people. We have slogans for it: Don’t compare your insides to other people’s outsides; You never know what someone else is going through; Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. But it’s something we don’t always think of when we relate to cookware. For the most part I’m glad all that heat and conflict stays inside the pot—but I’ve been thinking how impossible it is for a Pyrex saucepan to understand that all anyone else can get a grip on is its handle.

Which, regardless of maelstrom or meltdown in the pan, remains at room temperature at all times.

So is the pot hot, or is it cold?

Hot, says the pot. You just don’t know.

Cold, says anybody who holds the pot. That’s right, I don’t.

ANOTHER THING ABOUT this saucepan is that—violently and with very little warning, as though it suppresses and suppresses and suppresses and saves up and saves up and just can’t anymore! and FOOM!—the seething stuff boils over, unexpectedly, while it’s over a LOW FLAME, if you can believe it, and then if you grab the burner and turn it down, or yank the pot off the stove, it just KEEPS GOING, eructations of oatmeal all over the stove and the floor, which it does not apologize for and does not volunteer to clean up.

See, says the pot? Hot. Passionate, even.

I HOVER WHEN my kids use it, waiting for the moment when it takes a shot at their confidence. You did everything right, I told one of my boys today after I grabbed it off the burner while he was whisking. It’s not you, sweetheart; it’s the lousy pot. You didn’t do anything wrong. This pot—you just shouldn’t trust it. It’s just a bad pot. You can’t tell what’s going on with it until it’s too late.

Yanking it off the burner doesn’t work. Giving it a little more care and attention doesn’t work. Lowering the heat doesn’t work. By the time it gets to the point where you can see what’s about to happen, it’s sucked up so much energy that a second later, it’s already erupting. You can’t stop it. You can’t soothe it. You just have to wait until it’s done spewing.

What did you expect? says the pot.

Well by now, I expect that.

LIFE GETS MUCH simpler when you accept your cookware for what it really is, and let go of what you wish it was. Especially when it keeps showing you. Especially when your kids are getting old enough that they’re starting to learn to judge temperature themselves, and you don’t want to confuse them.

Much simpler, that is, unless you’re the cookware.

In which case your life’s going to get harder as soon as the economy improves a little more.

Unexpectedly is the only way it ever happens

Today, even though I really couldn’t, I said yes when asked if I could spare an hour for the boys, and when they called me out to the dining room, their bikes were ready, they had their helmets on, my bike was by the door with sandwiches in the pannier, and the hour was to be spent riding down to the Little Red Lighthouse, throwing pebbles in the Hudson River, eating our sandwiches, and riding home.

It was their idea, I was told.

The descent from next to the Henry Hudson Parkway down to the Little Red Lighthouse—same descent, if you read it, that I used in my story in RIDE—is really two descents. This is more obvious if you’re climbing them, but it’s a steep little switchback, and then a straight downhill, and then it flattens and there’s a sharp curve through a short tunnel, over a short planked bridge, and down again, which shoots you straight past the tennis courts.

Last year my smaller boy wiped out on the flat, and boy, did he wipe out. I carried him and his bike down to the bottom, with blood running down his fingers and me doing a barely acceptable job of controlling my anger while he shrieked Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god! This is bad! This is bad! I’d contributed to his injury by trying to micro-manage his bike handling, so the anger was really shame.

But now it was 70° and maybe a little muggy, but also green and gray and pretty. There weren’t that many other bikes, and he was chattering away as we rolled up the shallow half-mile before the bollard that marks where the switchback drops. We were discussing the complexions of the two descents. He asked if I remembered when he wiped out. I put some energy into not sounding like I was wincing and said it wasn’t the hill that made him wipe out, it was that he was going too fast and not paying attention, and then he got scared and froze up and shimmied the bike, and that’s what put it down. But don’t forget, I said. This year, you have hand brakes. So you can feather your speed, trim your speed, if it’s too fast, you can slow it down. You could do the whole hill like— (I held my hand at an angle and made it descend like a funicular for snails.)

His brother, as usual, was fifty feet ahead. Even with seven-year-olds, I’m having conversations at the back of the pack.

DON’T PASS THE BOLLARD! I yelled.

He stopped immediately and looked back at us. So often, lately, when I’m trying to give him freedom, he thinks I’m reining him in.

***

Every time we get to the switchback, I make them dismount and put their bikes off the path and walk twenty feet down with me, where I point at various things about the personality of the first descent. See this part I’m standing on, right here? This spot is the steepest part. Now look, it hooks right here, but then all the way down to there? That’s straight. See how it’s straight? You can go fast down it, but don’t still be going fast when you get to the bottom, because see it turns there? So if you’re still going fast there, you’ll wipe out on the dirt.

They both chose to walk the first 40′ or so. They remounted while there was still a good kid-strength downhill grade and picked up speed through the short tunnel and over the wooden bridge. The chatterer coasted right past his wipeout spot. I saw the top of his brother’s red helmet disappear down the second descent as we were still traversing the flat.

***

And so the shameful wipeout was erased.

***

We threw pebbles in the river for a while. There’s no sand there, just big slabs of rock that you can walk on.

***

While we were eating sandwiches another hundred yards down the greenway, where we ended up after the bathroom, I said tell you what. The day you climb the first part? From where the lighthouse is, up to the wooden bridge? (And here there was another three minutes of getting their attention and repeating myself, which I’ll spare you.) The day you climb all the way to the wooden bridge, I’ll buy you whatever ice cream you want. If you climb it, you can choose the ice cream. If you do it, you can choose the ice cream. If two boys do it? Two kinds of ice cream.

If we can’t do it, do we still get the ice cream?

Nope.

We ate our sandwiches. They explained their secret trick, their plan for climbing the hill, which was to go really fast and then they’d just be up it. I explained how that wouldn’t work on this hill. It’s too long, too steep, and I really don’t even know if you guys can do it. (And there was another fifteen minutes of dickering over what needed to be eaten, why it was impossible to eat that, and the exact terms of the trade agreement governing the distribution of GoGurt, which I’ll spare you.) Then the wrappers and napkins got packed back in my pannier, and back-of-pack boy got on his bike and pedaled for the lighthouse, and his brother marched up to me, flexed like Hulk Hogan, and shouted MUST—CLIMB—HILL! and grabbed his bike.

***

When, in the course of your parenting adventure, you arrive at a juncture that requires you to either yell your guts out, cheerleading for your kid who’s climbing a hill that grownups—fit ones—consider That point where I turn around and go back downtown, or get your phone out and take pictures? Just remember I said this and you’ll be fine: To hell with the phone. It’s not an option. Cheer for that little human like it’s the first time in his entire life he’ll have achieved anything this big.

Because for two little humans, it was.

***

“DADDY! WHY DIDN’T WE GET ICE CREAM!”

We’d just dismounted after coasting down that half-mile. There were still concrete steps and a block of sidewalk to go.

“Did you see any ice cream stores on our way down the greenway?”

***

“Can I have some more ice cream, please?”

“No, you can’t have…yeah, all right. You earned it.”

***

Tonight was shampoo night during bathtime, one of my favorite things.

I’m very tired. I just wanted to get this all down, before things that matter less pressed in more, and I didn’t.

How to find a terrific InDesign production expert within 15 miles of Inwood, NYC

I USED TO do this thing where I had a roster of freelance clients (and the feast or famine that came with them), and along with that, I’d also take a long-term, part-time graphics job that didn’t get in the way of the feast and filled in the gaps during the famine.

My company, TYPEFLOW (I’m the only one here), has been doing production of trade show directories, books, and other long documents for a long time now, and in 2011, my book and ebook business absolutely took off. I mean, like, through the roof. Like busy.

Things finally took a breather this month, and I found myself drumming my fingers, looking at the economy improving, and thinking about that old system.

I want to get that going again. I liked it. It worked.

IN EXCHANGE FOR being my perfect situation, you’ll get an intelligent and highly skilled InDesign production person a few days a week—for the same price as that guy the agency sent. You know, the one you didn’t ask back.

When I’m not being a totally terrific production expert (yet charmingly humble), I’m a writer and long-distance cyclist, both of which I take seriously. I also take my seven-year-old twins seriously—though not so much when I’m holding them upside-down and tickling them. Still, they’re why I’m not interested in weekends.

So what I’m looking for is:

• steady, with a predictable schedule,
• 20ish hours per week,
• no weekends,
• within about 15 miles of Northern Manhattan,
• where they don’t mind me showing up on a bicycle
  and have somewhere I can put it (it’s a folding bike),
• and they need a skilled, professional production artist.
• Oh, and aren’t a large bank, pharmaceutical corporation, or tobacco company. Sorry. I’m sure you’re nice people.

I understand you may need me to stay a little extra sometimes; you understand I may need to switch hours around sometimes.

What are you looking for? Drop me a line: noteon at mac dot com.

THE 15-MILE THING lets me get my riding in. Here’s a map showing the approximate area. (Click for a larger version.)

That might look like too wide an area for a bike commute, but for perspective: Most days, I strap my laptop to my bike and ride to various Starbucks at the far edges of that oval, where I sit and work on freelance jobs. It’s my already-existing commuting area.

Resume: Lots of years of Adobe Creative Suite; know InDesign better than most people who get paid to use it; former Quark guru, now glad it’s dead. Very experienced in print and ebooks. HTML and CSS experience, but not that interested in web design, though I do enjoy working with web designers to create assets for sites. Lots of production-efficiency tricks; fast and accurate.

Samples: Please email me and tell me what you do there, so I know what samples to send: noteon at mac dot com.

The beginning of “Night Ride,” my story in RIDE: SHORT FICTION ABOUT BICYCLES

THE PRINT VERSION of RIDE: Short Fiction About Bicycles is now for sale at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and I don’t actually know where else. Hopefully I can find an indie source to link to, as well.

RIDE is now available in these fine formats

It includes “Night Ride,” my first crime fiction for sale since Ellery Queen’s published “Dead Gray,” which you can get for free if you’re an Amazon Prime member (or for 99¢ if you’re not).

Night Ride is long for a short story, about 50 pages, and it takes place in Inwood, where I live. (Inwood’s at the top of Manhattan.) It’s about fathers and sons. Here’s the beginning:

AT THE TOP OF THE RISE he waits for the signal from the bottom, and when he hears GO! he lets off the brake and pushes the pedals. It’s not a big chainwheel he’s got, so his feet are spinning at top speed in about three seconds—but by then he’s already flying.
      Last weekend he flashed past the dip at the bottom and got twenty feet up the other side before he had to stand out of the saddle. You had to stand when you climbed because it gave your legs more power.
      This time he’s going to hit the uphill with great strength, pump right up it, even the steep part, and then take the curve at the top without stopping, all the way behind the trees where no one can see him.
      GO GO GO GO the words whip past his ear and make him grin, sun and shadows strobing in his eyes, and then he’s ten feet up the shallow grade, twenty, thirty, the bike slowing so soon on the steep part and he’s up out of the saddle, fists clamped around the rubberized grips, King of the Mountains, polka-dot jersey. He chants:
      I-must-con-cen-trate.
      I-must-con-cen-trate.
      I-must-con-cen-trate.
      GO GO GO GO! behind him. YOU CAN DO IT YOU CAN DO IT CLIMB LITTLE MAN CLIMB CLIMB CLIMB CLIMB!
      Bobby is six.
      His daddy’s cheering for him. He climbs, climbs, climbs, conquers the little part where it’s steepest and you have to push your legs hard instead of just riding your bike, and then he’s out of sight where Daddy can’t see him, which is a great joke.
      Walking up the paved pathway toward him is an old man.
      “Hey, Bobby,” the old man says. “Remember me?”
      Bobby’s still looking at him when he hears his daddy’s bike come rolling up behind him.
      “Dad,” his daddy says.
      “Bob-by!” says his grandpa to his daddy.
 
“HOW’S HE DOING in school?” the old man asked, leaning in the kitchen doorway with a beer dangling.
      “All right.” Robert rinsing a pan.
      “That it?”
      “His teachers all love him. They call him ‘The Cool Kid’.”
      “Cool kid, huh? Sounds like he’s getting more pussy than you.”
      Robert set the pan on a dish towel and unscrewed an orange sippy cup. “He’s six, dad.”
      “Never too young. Less there’s something funny about him. You getting any?”
      “Me? I got a kid.”
      “Oh I dunno.” Robert Senior’s voice took on a lilt. “Didn’t slow me down…”
      Water ran, dishes clanked. His father looked at the walls—the messes of water damage and the gulleys of cracks along the corners.
      “So,” Robert said, “where you thinking you’re gonna stay?”
      The next voice was Bobby’s, saying, “Grandpa, this is my bike wrench.”
      “Oh yeah?” the old man said as Robert turned to check the interaction. “No shit.”
      “Dad.”
      “What,” his dad said, and the direct confrontation he’d been waiting for flared in the beered-up brown eyes. “Dad what.”
      A keg waited to be touched off.
      “Dad what.”
      Robert said, “Hey Bobby, whyn’t you show your Granddad all your tools?”
      “Yeah! Grandpa, come on!”
      “He carries ’em all around.” Turning back to the dishes. “Knows lots of stuff, how to fix a flat. He’s a strong little dude, but his hands are little so I gotta help him get the bead off the rim.”
      “Yeah, I’m a strong little dude.”
      “Yeah really, Buster Brown, you think so?”
      “Yeah, I’m really strong.” Bobby looked up at his Grandpa, so loving and happy, and Robert Junior’s heart broke.
      “You’ve made a friend today!” Bobby said.

I’ve been talking up the anthology as a whole, but that’s my story in it.

RIDE: Short Fiction About Bicycles

Riding bikes with twins

IN WHICH maybe four people in the world go ohhhhhh! once or twice, and the rest of you close the browser after two paragraphs.

MY SEVEN-YEAR-OLDS and I ride our bikes to school and the greenmarket. We’re not political about getting around on two wheels; we just like it. No matter how much we’re pissing each other off when we leave home, it’s smiles and hugs when we get where we’re going: It’s hard to stay pissy riding bikes with your kids (or your dad).

THE RULES

1. Stay right.


2. No racing.


3. Watch out for the people, and go waaaaay around them.


4. Look where you’re going, not down.

Come to think of it, #3 might work better as “No buzzing.” I’ll try it out this week.

There are also two locations where I stop them and say, “What are the rules?” That means the rules for those specific locations.

• THE BUS STOP is forty feet from the subway entrance, on Broadway, and we’re usually through there at rush hour. People streaming from the crosswalk, from arriving buses, and toward the subway. (We live in a neighborhood that people leave in the morning.) The rule is: Go slow and watch out for the people.
• ELWOOD STREET is a descent along a row of apartment buildings. The rule is: Stay left (this keeps children on bikes away from people exiting blind doorways) and stop at the end of the buildings, NOT at the end of the sidewalk. This is because if someone steps out from behind the building, they could get hit. On the second block of the descent, the rule becomes “Stop at the end of the red metal,” which is a railing against some vegetable bins.

Now that they’re better and safer riders than last year, I’ve started riding in the street while they’re on the sidewalk. Which allows the additional fun of little boys cackling and blowing past Daddy at T-intersections when he gets stuck at red lights.

THEY’RE AWESOME LITTLE bike guys, and they use bike club chatter correctly (“Bike up!” “Car back!” “Hold your line!” “Clear!”) and know lots of rules for responsible cycling in the city—

And for that reason, I find myself yelling too much, because all it takes is giving 30 seconds of my attention to the slowpoke, and the zippy one will be a couple of hundred yards ahead, doing something he’s not supposed to do. Like, on the greenway, he’ll be over on the left. I have no love of rules for their own sake, but if you’re a seven-year-old going the wrong way where giants are known to whiz around corners, you need your little butt moved to the right. Like, now. So there’s lots of STAY RIGHT! STAY RIGHT! THAT’S NOT THE RIGHT! STAY RIGHT! YOU’RE NOT STAYING RIGHT! GET OVER TO THE RIGHT! Which not only sounds like anger just because it’s YELLING, but starts feeling that way, too.

And then if he’s so far ahead he can’t hear me (or is ignoring me, not an unreasonable response to somebody who yells at you all the time), I have to leave the other one and go sprinting up there to correct his position.

And then I don’t know what’s going on behind me with the slowpoke.

I STILL HAVEN’T solved that particular problem—but when I learned that one of the boys’ teachers was making little books of rules with him, to help with his focusing, I asked whether they could start one about being a responsible cyclist, and I could review and adjust it to fit how we do things.

They did a great job with it together.

Today he and I sat down in the dining room and added to it.

I didn’t coach him on the lane-marking diagrams, except to remind him what the sharrows on Dyckman Street look like. He doesn’t like sharrows, though, so he declined to include them.

None of us like sharrows.

CROSSING THE STREET

STRICTLY SPEAKING, THIS caption isn’t true.

It’s Daddy’s job to check for cars. It’s a kid’s job to listen for what formation we’re going to cross in, get his bike positioned, and walk when it when Daddy says WALK ’EM. That all sounds like this:

“SCHOOLBUS! CHILD B IN FRONT!…AND…WALK ’EM!”

These formations are my main reason for this post.

Crossing a busy street with two kids and three bikes, the potential for a very fast cascade of errors is frightening. You can’t hold their hands, you can’t let go of your bike, the WALK signal is blinking and the livery cabs are creeping. You can’t stop in the crosswalk, and you can’t patiently explain anything.

Our basic crosswalk formation is SCHOOLBUS:

We get more or less in formation while we’re waiting for the green, and no part of a bike is allowed in the street until I say WALK ’EM. If I have to skip a red/green cycle because somebody’s being sloppy with his front tire in the gutter, I do. We don’t go until it’s right.

When I say WALK ’EM, front boy keeps his front wheel lined up with Daddy’s. Back boy stays close behind him, not allowed to bonk tires.

Those are the only rules. It has to stay simple and unambiguous; we’re in a New York City crosswalk with the seconds ticking down.

Commands like “SPEED UP!” or “SLOW DOWN!” or “YOU THERE, THE ONE WITH THE HAT!” would be confusing—which boy am I talking to? To what degree are they supposed to execute the concept? Does a helmet count as a hat? Without exception, the wrong child will hear and follow the order—and now I’ve got two problems, and both boys are confused. So unless there’s an emergency, the only thing I need to say in the crosswalk is this:

“WHEEL CHECK!”

I have to say it a lot, because little monkeys have forgotten, but everybody knows what to do.

AN EXPLANATION HAS just been demanded for why there’s no trailer attached to the parent’s bike in that diagram.

If you would like, you may add a trailer.

THE OTHER TWO formations are used less often.

• LINE FORMATION is all three front wheels aligned, and is really just for not making anybody take up the rear.
• SINGLE FILE is for when the available space is too narrow for walking abreast—most recently when we had downed trees from storm winds.

THE DAD I had in my head, before I became a father, might have worked out if it hadn’t been twins. He listened more than he talked, he was available and patient, he probably dressed well. I’m not him. I bark orders and wear five-year-old clothing that sort of fits.

But as long as that’s what it is, these barked orders work pretty well.

David Brooks feels superior to you

FROM DAVID BROOKS’ New York Times article, Let’s All Feel Superior:

…a zillion commentators over the past week, whose indignation is based on the assumption that if they had been in Joe Paterno’s shoes, or assistant coach Mike McQueary’s shoes, they would have behaved better. They would have taken action and stopped any sexual assaults.

Unfortunately, none of us can safely make that assumption.

None of us? Not one? Really? Or are you just talking about yourself and the herd, David?

Because I don’t disagree that you and the herd are cowards.

IF I EVER have two seconds before a meteor hits me, and I want to tell my six-year-old boys what a man is, this is what I’ll say:

A man stands up.

If I misjudged the meteor and I have another thirty seconds or so, I explain that when I say “man,” it’s because of my personal associations with the word, not because women are excluded from the thought, and that because I have boys and need to address what they will do when they are men, I’m being specific with my language and we’re all male.

If it turns out it wasn’t a meteor, it was just a Nerf ball with orange streamers taped to it, I retrieve my glasses and return to my point:

Standing up is difficult. We’re trained since childhood to be good, be nice, be respectful of authority, do what all the other children are doing, strangle our natures for the good of the collective and the sanity of the teacher. Sheep training begins on day one of preschool. Sit still, don’t speak without raising your hand, don’t yell, don’t hit, don’t object, don’t allow yourself to be triggered when your sense of right and wrong is activated. Never take responsibility for halting an injustice. Leave the scene, find a teacher, and assume authority knows better than you do. Be a social animal. Go along to get along.

Here’s what I guess nobody ever taught you, David Brooks: To know you’re going to stand up, you have to decide what you’re going to do in advance when you walk around that corner and find that child being abused, because that’s the very moment when your herd mentality and your subordination to authority and fear of physical harm are going to kick in. Yeah, you got that much right in your article: You are going to feel those pressures and fears, your adrenaline is going to go crazy, and your moral blinders are going to slam shut.

But none of those—not one—is what you’re going to do next.

So what are you going to do next? Do you know? Apparently the answer is yes: You spent a whole Times article forgiving yourself, in advance, for doing nothing.

But you don’t speak for the grownups, child.

I DON’T THINK you even speak for the children. I think you speak for the Times writing you a check to get people mad.

BUT LET’S SAY I’m wrong, and you write things you really believe, with no consideration for the number of comments and page hits a little button-pushing gets you.

You invoked the Holocaust: I invoke Oskar Schindler.

You invoked Rwanda: I invoke Gisimba, Wilkens, and an unknown army major.

You invoke you: I invoke me.

The main difference between us, I imagine, is that I know who I can stand to be afterwards. I don’t know whether I’m strong enough to do it when an army is approaching—I haven’t been tested, hope not to be, and frankly doubt I’m up to that—but I know what I’ll do if I see a child being raped.

You say you don’t?

I accept that.

So many people do nothing while witnessing ongoing crimes, psychologists have a name for it: the Bystander Effect. The more people are around to witness the crime, the less likely they are to intervene.

THIS IS TRUE and incontrovertible.

It also doesn’t support your premise. It’s about groups. It has little bearing on one person encountering one person committing an atrocity on one person.

May I, and those who believe as I do, be given the opportunity to prove ourselves. Because it will mean that when someone needs help, we—not you and the herd—are there.

For some of us, it’s a test we will feel the need to rise to.

Some of us won’t.

Some of us will.

 

Ride report: Rockland Lake 20K petite brevet

MY POLICY IS you can keep whatever trinkets you’re handed, but the one all the kids at your table got because they cleaned up nicely doesn’t go in the family medal case. You’re also allowed to bring them up in conversation every time your brother’s 15K or your father’s Super Randonneur series is mentioned, but the answer is still no, they’re not going in the case. It breaks a little part of my heart to tell you that, and breaks a little part of yours to hear it, but I’m sorry. They’re not.

On last year’s 15K, one of my five-year-olds DNF’d (“Did Not Finish”). So he got to suffer through watching his brother receive the sole award. This year, the suffering started a couple of weeks before the ride, but I was the one feeling it—because the two medals in my dresser, engraved with the names of two six-year-olds, wouldn’t be handed out for participation. The only way to get one—to even see it—would be to finish.

October 15, 2011

Ride start: Filling out brevet cards

THE CLOUDS WERE beautiful and fast-moving, so every few minutes the weather changed. It would be flat gray, and then we’d find ourselves riding through a strobing of sun and branch shadows.

The boy who DNF’d last year surprised me a month ago by suddenly becoming a good climber on the little hills in Inwood. He’s light, which is an advantage in climbing, and physically capable of racing his brother up Staff Street with some effort—adults walk their bikes up it—but whining and giving up were his two favorite hobbies this year. After his brother the Drift King got a brand-new rear tire because he’d deposited most of his tread on various sidewalks, the complainer started challenging himself to pull off longer skids, which somehow conflated itself with better hill work.

So I was able to tell him: I think you’re going to finish this year. You rode sixteen miles in one day at Summer Streets, and a 20K is only thirteen. And—it’s flat.

I think you’re going to finish.

So do I, he said. If I start the fourth lap? I know I’ll finish it.

THE VIDEO TELLS the next part of the story, so don’t skip it. They’re both small white boys in brown vests, but he’s the blue bike. Drift King’s is yellow.

THAT EVENING AT home, we talked about his different medals. He has two little plastic ones that he got at school for being tidy or something.

“Does this one feel different?” I asked.

It was still around his neck—he would eventually take it off at bath time. He rubbed his thumb over the front of it and looked thoughtful.

“I mean,” I said, “in your heart. Does this medal feel different from your other ones?”

He looked a little uncertain and rubbed it against his chest.

“Uh,” I said, “No, I mean…do you feel different about it?”

He wanted to give me the right answer, but he really had no idea what I was talking about. “Your feelings,” I said, “do you feel the same about this medal as you feel about your other ones?”

He slid his thumb over it again, doubtfully.

I took another couple of stabs, but I’d pointed him in the wrong direction, so I let it go and he wandered off.

A minute later, he brought his cheap participation medals into the kitchen, and said, “These ones—I don’t really like them, and I never even play with them, so I think I’m going to throw them in the trash.”

They were in the trash and he was gone before I could say anything.

NEXT OCTOBER: The Rockland Lake 25K.

These little 16″ bikes will be long gone by then.

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* Until a few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have believed even a great little six-year-old rider could pull off a twenty-foot skid, but on the way to the greenmarket—I’m on the street, they’re on the sidewalk—I hear the usual schhhhhhhhhhhhh behind me…and then I still hear it…and then I turn to look and he’s still skidding. Seriously, a twenty-foot black stripe. [back]

Song for a Monday

If the playback widget isn’t working, click here to go to the track.

Riff and commentary: Boy on left
Train status: Boy on right
Saxophone: Some guy across the tracks on the uptown side while
we were waiting for a downtown train.

Vocals and saxophone recorded on iPhone.
Thanks to Paul Heitsch for pointing out some mixing stuff.

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lps