well, maybe just a portion of it. this past saturday i got the call around one in the afternoon. yes, i was still in bed and totally enjoying not moving. but alexis rang and asked if i would be down for a bike ride and meet the awesome soccer chicks for some grub and beers at dixie’s. why the hell not?
now, let’s please keep in mind that i have not been on a bicycle in probably eight or nine years. so i was a little more than wary when i got to alexis’ house and he put me on one of his road bikes, a la lance armstrong. he took off his “good wheel” so that i wouldn’t bitch it up. so i took it for a quick spin around the block and it was just like riding a bike. well, because it WAS riding a bike. the hardest part was getting my shoes into those little stirrup thingies once i got going.
the saying “just like riding a bike,” in my mind, pretty much means that no matter how long it has been between the last and next time that you do something, you don’t lose anything from you ability to do it. alexis actually flat out asked me at one point if i knew how to ride a bike. unless they changed something, i pretty much had it covered.
and i gotta tell ya, cruising around the neighborhoods and such took me back to the summers when i lived on my bike. i would find my bike laying in the front yard where i dumped it just before dark the night before. i remember one of my first bikes was a goodwill purchase. it was red with the banana seat and ape hangers on it. not as cool as it would be today. so we took that five dollar bike, spray painted it blue, changed the seat and bars, and did our best to make it look as BMX as possible. would have killed for some mushroom grips.
but on those summer visits to dad’s the bikes were the first thing in the truck. riding up to the pool, down to kahle’s or jean’s for penny candy, or maybe down to the park with our baseball gloves over the grip. all the neighborhood kids. living on vine street, we were naturally “the vine street vandals.”
man, that was nice on saturday. lex and i met up with candace, will, and kate around two thirty uptown. they were all riding cruisers. dixie’s was having some sort of ladies only deal (a. who the hell wants to cut out over half the drinking population on a saturday afternoon? and b. what the hell were they doing in there?), so we cruised over to the pub at gateway village. what a cool ride going through the uptown traffic. felt like one of those crazy bike messengers. alright, maybe not.
we all got our grub (sans bacon) and polished off a few buckets of ice cold domestics before cruising down to candace’s place for some backyard fun. “soccer tennis” was on tap next. a sixteen by sixteen concrete patio slab with a line down the middle. two on two. you get one bounce to kick the ball back over the line. hilarity ensues. so does a fair amount of smack talk. kate and i paired up to form team ghetto bait (aptly named for one of the most disgusting displays by a hood rat that crawled out of the sewer thinking he had a shot with the hot chicks at a patio bar by describing his genitalia. a sad commentary on our society.). we were holding our own until a nasty stubbed toe took kate out of the game. it reminded me of the whole monty python “its just a flesh wound” skit. poor girl is dripping blood on the patio and just asking for a square of TP or something. cracked me up.
after that, i made my first attempt at skateboarding. i tried it as a kid, but i come up extremely short in the balance and coordination categories. the girls had one of those longboards which was pretty easy to maneuver.
the day grew long and the instinct to get home before the street lights came on set in. so alexis and i hopped on our bikes and pedaled the four miles or so back to the hood. i could have been 10 riding with jas back from greider park. i could have been 12 riding back from baseball practice with max. but i was 32 with a nice peace of mind.
of course i ordered a bike online sunday…