The Bike Ride

On unexpected paths

It was too pretty of a day not to get on the bike. And as the sun brightened the afternoon, my pedaling felt like traveling to my future self, or maybe it was my past self finally catching up.

The ride started innocently enough, same as many, south down the street where I live to the railroad tracks and through the quiet neighborhoods of our small town. There was little wind, little resistance, and my energy was high. The movements came easily. I traveled past the big playground and the elementary school, past a home where a family had gathered on the side porch for a midday Sunday lunch in the good weather. It was the kind of beginning on which memorable rides are made.

But my bike, seemingly on its own, powered by its own will, took me down new streets, roads I had not been on before, fresh paths, yet oddly familiar, as if revisiting something I had long forgotten and only now remembered. These streets rose and tumbled more than most midwestern streets with which I have become accustomed, those usual straight and flat north-south parameters. And on a turn toward a church, as it was Easter afternoon, two young women, in their early teens in colorful spring dresses walked the quiet street from the doors of the place of worship, smiling and talking. The sight triggered a memory and I recalled an Easter of my own as boy, wearing a small red child’s sport jacket and a cap, a kind fo fedora with a feather in it my mother had bought for me. A dapper young man on that Sunday long ago, searching the small lawn of our small brick home outside Pittsburgh, a pink and purple basket in his hand, hunting for the eggs that had been hidden in the bushes and behind the tulips. I had not thought of that day in so very long, and I smiled. I longed for the innocence of that moment, the simple beliefs I carried then—the Easter Bunny and a risen King.

I have long lost those beliefs. The Easter Bunny certainly, and Jesus, well, I consider him a great philosopher, worthy of study and attention. But the Son of God is another matter. Yet, it was something to belief in, something many of us can’t seem to find in these days of wearing masks and vaccinations and so many deaths. And this thought could not be shaken as I rode the new streets. What do I believe in? Not the religious belief, but what is instead in my constitution, what do I stand for and hold dear?

When I was a young man, I did not have the courage to dream outside my small life. I believed what I saw before me—school, playing in the yard, baseball in the field near the cemetery, and my father’s work and my mother’s meals. The friends in my neighborhood lived with families whose parents had lived in the same homes for decades, the homes where the parents before them had also lived. You stayed in your place because this is what you know. And I stayed, for a while. It was my mother who saw more for me, who saw the horizon. She was the one who believed I should stretch and grow. And in her quiet way, she insisted I go to college, the first in my family. And I did. And I grew, in tiny increments, in ways that took more years to notice. And I moved away from that neighborhood and those lives. Not because I wanted to, but because I needed to do so. Not because I had distain for those who lived there, but because I saw too much sadness in the unexamined life.

And so, I set out to examine, and that is what I do, this is what I believe, this is what is in the center of my constitution—the examination.

I soon found myself riding on a busy street, and ahead, I could see a large park, big trees and paths where people walked. Picnic tables where people sat in the shade. A little boy with his dog. In recent years, I have returned to these bike rides, not unlike the ones of my childhood. Bikes rides that had been such a big part of my spring, summer, and fall days as a boy. Following high school, and for many years after, I abandoned the bike. It was decades before I returned to one. And as I pedaled on this Sunday into the park, I thought of those years. A full circle, it has been. Back to the bike. Back to the joy of it. The ride to the park. But yet, so different. My rides now are done with open eyes, and the strength that I’m sure I did not possess as a kid. Not the strength of muscle and breath, but the strength of seeing more clearly the paths I take—recalling what had been, and examining what is new. The paths were fresh on that Easter ride, but also accompanied by the memory of where one has been, has gone, and will go.

When I returned home, I leaned my bike against the wooden fence near the rear door of my home, and I pulled out my small leather notebook from my pack and wrote what I thought I had come to believe on that Easter afternoon.

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Photo by Adam Stefanca on Unsplash

Photo by Yaopey Yong on Unsplash