Listen to Jim’s 3-minute podcast:
http://redclaydiary.com/
or read his diary entry below:
BORN TO BE MILD
a long-ago entry in my ancient Red Clay Diary…memories still fresh as greens…
The rusty pedal car I own when I am tiny and a wee bit young…somewhere along the way it disappears. Or I grow too large to occupy it. Or I graduate to tricycle and simply ignore those squeaky pedals that up till tricycle mean so much to me.
As predicted by everyone but me, even the tricycle is left kudzu-covered in the back yard when suddenly an old used bicycle comes upon me and I learn to unwobble my way to bikehood.
I haven’t mounted a bicycle for nearly six decades, but I can feel it beween my legs as if it is still here.
Here goes.
The free ride of a bicycle. Push of pedal. Turn of wheel. Press of brakes. Spokes & fastened bottle caps and rubber-bulbed horn and flickering battered headlight and reflector discs.
Flimsy wire basket up front. Pants cuffs tucked into high-pulled socks. Axle grease and narrow bent passenger-perch right behind. Fanny-piercing triangled seat and rubber-tipped anodized handlebars. High-ride bars versus cool-looking lowered bars.
And that moment of stasis when going uphill has to switch to walking & pushing.
Finding just the right hill to coast down in free-fall, hair-combing wind in my face, and stinging eyes and tooth-lodged insects. And sweatsweatsweat. And that strange sensation when I stop, dismount and feel the contrasting silence with its stunned density all around, in contrast to the movement, the movement.
How could any destination compare to this paused moment?
Then, anticipation hovers…the anticipation of the next ride, the next adventure, the next quest.
Then there’s the patch patch patch of used blown tires, the fear of theft thus chain and padlock. The certain feeling that there will never be another vehicle as freeing as this vehicle…the freedom ride to Somewhere Else, someplace different.
And, eventually, the notion that the trip goes only so far before it rounds itself into homeward bound.
Arriving back home to recount adventures to mother and siblings.
The comforting belief that the day will be complete once a homecooked meal beckons with fragrance and stomach grumble.
The starry late-night dreams snuggled under covers with me, the ever-young imagineering bike kid floating, floating abed.
Anticipating the sun and the dew and the next great trek
© Jim Reed 2018 A.D.