The kid bike post

MY BOYS GOT real bicycles at age four. $200 each. Parents and grandma went in on them together.

The moment that made me understand the depth of pride that a four-year-old can feel for a new yellow bike occurs on video. We were walking back from his first day with it at the playground. He didn’t want me to carry it; he wanted to walk it. And then he says, “This is my new bike,” and the way he says it…

I didn’t even see it when it actually happened. I had to be watching the video that night to notice. It still gets me right in the heart every time I watch—because I can tell that it got him right in the heart to have been given such an amazing thing. It had never occurred to him that something this wondrous could happen to him.

Sleet on air conditioner

Sleet in Inwood today.

http://wee.im/wBOA44

Best in headphones, not turned all the way up. Let it sound like rain.

Mekka-lekka hi

“THAT’S THE MOST I’ve seen you laugh in a long time.”

The challenge here is to find a way to talk about both The Pee-Wee Herman Show and my last year without:

1. an ill-advised degree of detail (about either); or,
2. a defanged and meaningless result.

So bear with me.

That’s a pun. There’s a bear in the show.

IT’S BEEN A year that pulls me out of bed and dresses me and sends me riding a bike around a dark city, alone at three in the morning, because there’s no mercy in a silent room. The past is a process server. It didn’t track you down so it could invite you to Disneyland.