IT'S LIKE RIDING A BIKE
/ONCE YOU'VE LEARNED, you never forget. Funny thing: here at seventy-something, I found there are more and more things that my mind thinks it remembers like it was yesterday, but my body doesn't seem to recall having ever done that. E.g.: Someone told me the other day that old people forget how to skip. My mind knows what skipping is. I know it when I see it. If a kid comes skipping along I might say, "You're a good skipper."
BUT, do I have the muscle memory to do it? After hearing this rumor, I decided to try it. I waited until I was home alone and certain no one was watching. I had my phone nearby in case I needed to crawl to it to call nine-eleven.
LARRY’S BIKE SHOP. SHAWNEE, OKLAHOMA
What do you know? I can still skip.
I can still feed myself. I can still play my drum set, including the marching cadences from my high school days in the Jenks Trojan Marching Band. I can still type and play a decent game of ping pong.
BUT, what happens if we forget rudimentary stuff?
In a book for tweens called, NEVERFORGOTTEN, the idea of forgetting-how is explored. Here's a portion of a review I read of the book:
In this dual-language novella, the Colombian author Alejandra Algorta tells the story of Fabio, whose mother, a baker, trades eight bags of homemade bread for a girl’s salmon-colored bike. She removes the handlebar ribbons and gives the bike to Fabio. His bus driver father teaches him to ride, assuring Fabio as he runs behind the bike, “Even if I let you go, I won’t let you go.”
Fabio overcomes the stigma of the girl-bike provenance, and discovers his worth and identity. On the bike, he delivers his mother’s bread, empowered. He has been released from Bogotá’s outskirts and from his pedestrian neighborhood to the dust and danger of the monster city, his world new and exciting. “Strangely for Fabio,” Algorta writes, “the neighborhood through which he journeyed on his bicycle was much more illuminated than the one he walked, was warmer, more fleeting, softer, more bird than cage.”
Now, on wheels, he is flying and free, and often trailed by a pack of children on their own bikes. Within a few years, as he grows stronger and his intuitions on the bicycle flourish, he becomes a mythical leader. It is whispered that he is “half boy and half bicycle.”
Unexpectedly and without explanation, he wakes one morning and has forgotten how to pedal. In front of an audience of bicycle-children, he falls repeatedly. Puzzled and humiliated, he hides beneath his bed, trying to determine the cause. Has he forgotten the mechanics of pedaling because his father taught him to ride on an inauspicious day — Wednesday? Or because the bicycle is a pinkish orange, a color meant for girls only? Could this new inability be the result of never having learned to ride with training wheels first, like other children, a step that might have been integral to memory? No matter the reason, he is now inept and defeated, his power replaced with fear. His father and mother reassure him that “what the body knows, it knows forever.” But Fabio declares that this is a lie. He is proof. When he forgets the thing that everyone says is unforgettable, he begins to question everything known in his world, including how to carry on.
I'm reluctant to share the source of this review for fear it will waken some fundamentalist who will question why a boy is riding a "girl" bike and then gather up all the copies of the book and burn them. Oh well. You can read the review in the NYT by clicking here.
Apparently, sarcasm and saltiness are unforgettable skills as well.
Here's the next question. Just because I still remember how to ride a bike; should I? I'm not as agile, responsive and quick as I once was. My core strength should no longer be called a strength. I'm pondering these deep issues because I'm thinking of getting one of these new-fangled electric bikes; e-bikes.
Is this just a pedal-assisted road on a fool's errand?. I promise to wear a helmet and something in a nice florescent green. If things don't go well; according to my driver's license, I am an organ donor. Not that I have anything anyone would want.
We just made a road trip through Iowa. The rolling hills of corn on farm after farm are beautiful. Why are the farms and homes of Iowa so neat and maintained? Just curious.
Occasionally we would drive through an Amish settlement. Clotheslines displayed an artist's pallet full of pastel garments drying in the sun against a backgound of deep green meeting deep blue at the horizon line. On the shoulder of the highway black buggies were pulled by single horses. And look. There's an e-bike store. WAIT! What in the barn-raising world is an e-bike store doing out here in the middle of modernity-rejection?!?!
Turns out e-bikes have been approved for use in many Amish communities. The young people have fully embraced them. If you're wondering: they wear their straw hats instead of helmets. You have to draw the line somewhere.
Where is the line for this old curmudgeon when it comes to buying and riding an e-bike? It could be healthy. Some pedalling is required. It could be severly unhealthy. I hopefully have set my affairs so that my family will be taken care of. As I'm typing this the outside temp is 99F with 110% humidity, which according to my calculations means a "feels-like" temperature of hell. This whole e-bike thing sounded a lot more fun that day in Iowa when it was in the seventies.
I'm compelled to do something that feels like moving forward, even if it's downhill or pedal-assisted. Inertia is heavy and I can't let the new and different paralyze me. Remember the last line I shared from the review of the book about Fabio and his bicycle: "When he forgets the thing that everyone says is unforgettable, he begins to question everything known in his world, including how to carry on."
I can't remember ever not-knowing how to ride a bike, or swim, or drive a stick shift, or tell if a watermelon is ripe before cutting it open. It seems a shame to not put all that knowledge to good use.
Back in my early bike-riding days I was given certain limits. I was not to leave Quincy Ave, the street where we lived and go out on 71st street. I was not to ride my bike to the river.
Did I ever cross 71st or go to the river? Of course.
Today, my bike riding limits are set by my endurance and energy level, and abhorrence to heat. I have a very cool cruiser style bike but it's a single speed. Our house sits on a rise. No matter which direction I ride I have to climb a hill to get back home. An e-bike would allow me to ride to the metaphorical river once again. It sounds so fun and transgressional. Why not? After all: once you learn...
