bike wank, part 0

[kirkcudbright]

Okay, it's been something like 5 weeks since I've posted, and I'm going to be talking about bikes. Furthermore, the next several posts are going to be about my bikes, because a) I have (*cough*) six bikes, and b) I've been obsessing about my upcoming trip, so bikes are rather on my mind. You've been warned.

But before I start the gallery of bikes, for the sake of completeness, there are the pre-historic bikes.

i. Some kind of 50's or 60's vintage single-speed, coaster brake bike, which my parents trash-picked from the dump. Really. I don't remember anything about the bike itself (it might have been red, or not), but I was riding it to school by second grade (1971).

I don't know about where you live, but here and now kids don't ride bikes to school, especially in elementary school. Hardly any of them even walk to school, and when they do, I always see the parents walking them to school. We're half a mile from the public elementary school, but the neighbors' kids take the bus - the bus! to go half a mile! When my brother was in second grade, he was in charge of walking me to kindergarten. By the time I was his age, I was on my own, baby.

I've heard from other folks in other school districts that the kids are Not Allowed to come and go on their own - that they only be released to parents or bus drivers. I don't know if that's the norm, but that's really sad. [In the spirit of full disclosure, I drive Kylie to school, but it's 4 miles from the house, and on my way to work (which is 30 miles, too far for me to bike more than occasionally).]

Anyway, that was then, that was the bike I learned to ride on. I doubt any pictures of it exist.

ii. Raleigh Colt 3-speed, circa 1970, dark green. I got this around 7th grade (1976). It was my introduction to shifting and hand-brakes, and I nearly died on it more than once. It was heavy and klunky and underpowered by almost anyone's standards now, but I loved it like no other bike before or since.

It was also the only bike that's ever been stolen from me. It was locked to a chain-link fence behind the high school, so it would have been Saturday marching band practice or something, around 9th grade. Anyway, it was gone when was done with whatever I was doing, and I never got it back. It was broad daylight, it was locked, it was registered with the police (something I've never bothered to do since then), and I never got it back.

iii. The orange beasticle - my first 10-speed. This was the replacement for the 3-speed, and it couldn't be more different. Oh, they were both heavy cheap lugged steel, but this was older, cruftier, and orange - theft-deterrent orange. Nonetheless, this was the bike of my high school and college years, my faithful steed, my transport around town (and around the county) at all hours of the day and night.

There was a summer in college when I was living in Sunderland and cooking in Northampton, and biked 15 miles down every afternoon, and 15 miles back every night after midnight - with no helmet or light, of course. I got my first bike helmet as a wedding present, from a recent housemate who witnessed me biking around Camberville at night with no Protection. It's a wonder any of us survived to procreate, but somehow it happened.

The beasticle left me in the mid-90's, in a Saturn (the car dealer) program called Cycle Recycle - something like Bikes Not Bombs, where they collected old bikes, fixed them up, and gave them to unsuspecting kids. I traded my bike for a T-shirt. And I can't feel bad about it. Because I was already on my way to...

Next time: the Gallery of Bikes

Comments

[c1.livejournal.com]

I'm convinced that the schools are keeping kids from walking so much as ten yards to get to school. This, of course, is moronic and flies in the face of practicality. But I think part of it is driven by the media. We don't have the Cold War and its specter of hair-trigger-fingers hanging over The Button to keep us entertained anymore. What do we have? Crime That Happens To Other People Who Look Like Us. If we look at what's happening in the police blotter, it's exactly the same as what's been happening for the past 100 years, just the names and the faces have been changed. But the networks, eager to keep us from Tivo-ing or clicking the remotes across our 100 channels of MTV, will broadcast anything sensational enough to glue our eyes to _their_ channel in the video wasteland.
So now, instead of watching the President and the Premier rattle sabers at each other, which Doesn't Look Like Us, we get to see the daily crimes of the day, writ large, which become the next knee-jerk-reaction policy made up on the back of an envelope, hastily passed at the last town meeting.
As you said, How we ever lived long enough to procreate is beyond me.
(Oh, and that thing about Iraq? Yeah, some of us pay attention, but face it, it doesn't have our attention like The Bomb did.)

[persis.livejournal.com]

When Talis was in school I inquired about biking to school... apparently, here in Milford, bike racks are too dangerous to have at elementary school. I was speechless (fortunately, as what would've come out would not have been pretty). We compromised by having her ride her bike to a friend's house about a quarter mile from home, leave it in their driveway, and walk the rest of the way to school. We lived all of .5 mile from the 3/4 grade school.

BTW, do you know where I can pick up a decent used bike for Talis? She's outgrown her old one; knees hitting her chin and all. Old one probably had 16-inch wheels.

[kirkcudbright.livejournal.com]

Dunno if you know hawkegirl, but she has 4 kids, and does a lot of bike stuff, so she might have a better line on this stuff than I do. Kylie is not yet to the point of needing a new bike, but she's approaching the point where she might benefit from one.