Feet, Meet Pedals

What’s the fastest way to combine all of my biggest fears at once: seriously losing my balance in public; flying ass-over-teakettle over the top of a hastily opened car door; running over a small child; making ill-fated impulse transportation purchases; going through a well-intended, going through half-hearted but mostly inexpensive phase?

Turns out buying a 30-year-old bike on Craigslist accomplishes all of the above. After the Jetta-buying Fiasco of 2007, I vowed to wait longer than 24 hours before buying anything with wheels ever again, but a deal is a deal. Which is why I named said bike, a pretty sky-blue1973 Schwinn Suburban, after St. Hildegard, an11th century nun and severe migraine sufferer. A bike can’t go wrong if you give it a saint’s name immediately, right?

(I first read about Hildegard von Bingen in the excellent new migraine memoir “A Brain As Wide As the Sky,” by Andrew Levy. Incidentally, Levy signed my copy of the book at the Printer’s Row Book Fair last weekend, and I plan to post a much lengthier review of it in the very near future.)

The thing nobody realizes when they say something like “Don’t worry, you won’t forget, it’s just like riding a bike,” is that getting back on a bike after many, many years is really hard! If I lived in Princeton I’d haul the bike to a cemetery and re-teach myself the basics — you know — important things such as starting and stopping, making 90 degree turns, playing chicken with cars on narrow roads, and avoiding other potentially deadly hazards.

Instead, on my first jaunt today, I reminded myself of one of the cutest things I’ve ever seen. One day Katie, Ryan and I saw a father teaching his little girl how to ride her bike on a busy street in downtown Evanston. While we waited for a stoplight we overheard the dad ask the girl “Are you OK? Are you scared?” To which she said “Yeah, I’m scared!” Then her dad asked, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how scared are you? Really scared?” “Really scared, a 10,” she said.

Using the same scale, I was probably at a 6 on the relatively quiet residential streets I practiced on today. But I’m within riding distance of a couple big cemeteries, so stay tuned.

But, and this is key, the most important thing is having a patient teacher.