The truth about riding a bike

I was disappointed when my mother told me recently she was going to buy me a bike. I guess I always envisioned a cute little old yellow Volkswagen with fluffy tie-dye seat covers and dice hanging from the rear view mirror as my first set of wheels. The shopping trip to Target proved almost fruitless. We made a mess, pulling out bike after bike. I’d ride them up and down the aisles, wobbling around corners, knocking a few cumbersome items off their overstocked shelves. It’s kind of hard to maneuver in a store. Every bike, I pronounced too big. My feet hardly touched the ground. “Well, what do you suggest we do about it?” Mom asked. Buy me a car, I yelled in my head. I didn’t say anything out loud because with gas prices rising, that solution was out of the question. In the end we got a pink bike and took off the back reflector to let the seat down as low as it would go.
The last time I rode a bike, I tried to stop at a stop sign and fell into a bush, only to scramble up hoping for no witnesses, only to see a little old man across the street staring at me with eyes wide and mouth dropped open. He looked thoroughly panicked.
I was kind of scared to test my new bike out on the roads. I delayed it as much as I could, saying I was tired, that my legs hurt, that I had things to do. After a while, I realized that I was living up to the stereotype of the whining, selfish teenager, so I bit the bullet and got on.
Let me tell you, there’s nothing like the freedom of riding a bike. In a car, your fellow drivers are your competitors, your enemies. Everyone is out to save themselves and if mistakes are made, there’s a whole lot of finger-pointing and yelling and zooming and honking. On a bike, your fellow bikers are your friends. They know the pain of steep hills, that ache and strain in the thighs. They know the momentary panic of cars rushing past too close. They know the smells. Barbecues and garlic, laundry detergent and mud, asphalt after rain, day, crisp and clean. They know the sounds. Lawn mowers sputtering into action, roosters crowing, the whistle of wind past ears, the crunch of tires over gravel, voices dug deep into conversation. It’s the voices, yes, the voices that you miss driving in a car. They waft through town, rising on the breeze. Some are small and timid. Others are big and robust. Sometimes these voices laugh. Sometimes they yell, exasperated. Sometimes they just talk, talk, talk. I’ve caught a thousand snippets of conversation riding on my bike. Something about voices twined together, picking up where the other leaves off, something about voices raw with emotion gives me a whole new faith in the human race. They leave me feeling content, like I’ve nothing to fear except maybe the next pothole in the road. In a car, you can save time, stack on minutes left for leisure, for sleep, for everything that can’t be stuffed into one day. But on a bike all those minutes you don’t save for other unknown, second-thought things are filled with sight and sound and being.