Introduction
Here is the fifth “old yarn” on albertnet (following in the
footsteps of “The Cinelli Jumpsuit,” “Bike Crash on Golden Gate Bridge,” “The Enemy Coach,” and most recently “The Brash Newb”).
This is the kind of story that would normally be a “From the Archives” item,
except I’ve never before written it down.
Trigger warning: this post is long. It is a rambling tale
that doesn’t skimp on any details. And no, it won’t teach you this weird little
secret your doctor doesn’t want you to know. It won’t give you the social
currency you’d get from talking with colleagues about the last episode of America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys
Cheerleaders Season 2.* So if you’re cool with bike lore of no particular interest
to your social network, then read on. But if you’re impatient and/or won’t read
anything you can’t summarize in a tweet (I refuse to say “X”), go somewhere else.
(*As much as it sounds like I made up this TV show, I didn’t.
It’s the fifth most popular show on Netflix right now. The center cannot hold.)
Learning to shift –
late summer 1978
As I mentioned last week, one of the cooler things my dad ever did was to buy my brothers and me 10-speed
bikes long before any other kids had them. In fact, these were the first bikes
we ever owned. This yarn is about the day—in fact, the very moment—I learned
how to shift gears. If that sounds really boring, don’t worry: I’m here to
entertain, not to edify. This post describes, among other things, three bike
crashes and one near-death experience. (Why isn’t this post mainly about the near-death experience?
Because that didn’t change my life. It just put it briefly in jeopardy.) (Full
disclosure—if I can be permitted to directly follow a parenthetical with
another parenthetical—this post doesn’t feature any really gory crashes. For
that, click here or here.)
The peculiar thing about getting this ten-speed for my ninth
birthday was that my dad forbade me to touch the gear-shift levers. I asked why
my bike even had them if I wasn’t
supposed to touch them. “Don’t worry about that,” was all he said in reply.
This was pretty typical of my dad. He didn’t really like dialogue. He
absolutely loved a good monologue, so long as he was delivering
it and on a topic of his choosing (for example, the design of an interferometer
he was building), but had little patience for pushback or even pointed
questions, which could seem like insubordination. So I just kept my mouth shut
and, in the ensuing days and weeks, even months, rode the bike around in first
gear all the time. Yes, I was that well-behaved and craven.
I don’t know exactly why
my dad prohibited gear shifting, but it’s not hard to guess. His opinion of his
four sons wasn’t exactly rosy. It’s probably Geoff and Bryan’s fault. They’re
twins and the oldest. Family lore (passed down from our mom) has it that our
dad originally had high hopes for his kids, figuring we’d all be the genius
offspring he richly deserved, but these hopes were dashed early. When the twins
were still babies, he caught them trying—and failing—to throw all their blocks
out of their crib. They weren’t clever enough to align the blocks properly to
fit through the slats. These dumb babies were just banging the blocks against
the slats, perpendicular to them. Disgusted, Dad brought our mom over to
witness this atrocious stupidity. Did she wonder if jettisoning the blocks was
even the goal of these babies, vs. enjoying the chock-chock-chock sound they
were making? Or was she tempted to explain to her husband about realistic
infant development milestones? Apparently not. It seems nobody ever corrected my
dad, and from that day forward he had to live with the sad “truth” that his
kids just weren’t up to snuff. (Other family lore has it that he said to me
once, “You’re not very bright, are
you.” It’s tempting to dismiss this anecdote except there were five witnesses.
Could we all be wrong? Well, actually, yeah, but not necessarily.)
Where bicycles were concerned, our dad was particularly pessimistic
about our capabilities. As described here, all three of my brothers and I distinctly recall our dad’s reaction when Max
(who’d drawn the short straw) asked if we could register for the Red Zinger
Mini Classic bike race. “You boys are too stupid to race bicycles,” he
declared. “You’d get yourselves killed.”
So why did he even buy us cool ten-speeds, if he had such a
low opinion of our cycling prospects? I put this question to my brother Max. His
reply was along the lines of, “Typical one-speed kid’s bikes disgusted Dad. No
son of his would ride anything so vulgar. We had to be on proper ten-speeds
whether we deserved them or not.”
Now, I realize I should be careful not to drag my brothers
too far into my own story as regards the gear-shifting prohibition. I don’t
specifically recall them being included in this, so I asked Bryan about it. “I
think we were allowed to shift,” he said. “We probably ruined that for you with
our own screw-ups.” He proceeded to recall how he tried to fix one of the
brakes on his bike. He loosened the cable-fixing bolt, perhaps for diagnostic
purposes, and pulled the cable out. Back then the cable would feed through a
very narrow cylindrical aperture before being bolted down. Since this is the
same dumb kid who as a baby couldn’t even throw a block out of his crib, you
won’t be surprised to learn what happened next: he couldn’t get the cable back
in. In fact, when he tried, the individual steel strands broke free from one
another, fraying hopelessly. Bryan broke down in despair, convinced that he’d
entirely wrecked his bike. Not only would he not have it to ride anymore, but
he’d be in big trouble with Dad.
If getting in trouble for bike problems strikes you as
preposterous, you obviously never met our dad. He was so devoted to his career,
any extra parenting demands that pulled him away from his work during an
evening or weekend was like a crisis. Nothing, it seemed, peeved him more than
extra child-rearing tasks. We would actually be in trouble for getting a flat tire on our bikes. This was
construed as an act of moral turpitude, like we were trying to throw our dad’s world into a tailspin by running over
something sharp. It’s like nothing
was an accident … every mishap was an act of treachery. All this being said, there
was a positive side to our dad’s oppressive reign, which is that we learned how
to fix our bikes ourselves, so that our “crimes” could be kept secret.
But of course, this frayed cable incident occurred long before
Bryan developed any proficiency as a mechanic. At the time he bemoaned his
plight to our babysitter, H—, who took pity on the boy and intervened, calling
our dad at work to soften the blow. The upshot was that Dad didn’t get angry
with Bryan (or at least kept it to himself), but he also didn’t get around to
fixing the bike for what felt to Bryan like a year. Needless to say, until the
bike was fixed, Bryan was forbidden to ride it. Our bikes always had to have two working brakes.
I told this story to my younger daughter, who incredulously
asked, “Why wasn’t Uncle Bryan allowed to ride with just one brake? One is
plenty!” Now, before you decide that her attitude marks me as an incompetent
parent, let me just say I keep a pretty close eye on the family fleet and proactively
make any repairs necessary. The only time my daughter has ridden with only one
brake is when she was off at college and burned through a set of brake pads on
her Breezer while I wasn’t looking. Well, okay, that’s not entirely true because she sometimes borrows my mid-‘60s Triumph
3-speed, whose coaster brake occasionally fails for reasons I cannot fathom
(much less fix). But that’s pretty rare. In general I am a stickler for
bicycles having two working brakes.
(Here is a drawing, by my daughter, of her Breezer. It’s not
pertinent to the story, but when your kid pays such a loving tribute
to her bicycle, you kind of want to share it.)
Now, being committed to truth in these pages, I must disclose
something: my dad’s strict rules notwithstanding, I myself became quite
reckless about the two-brake rule, a mere three or four years after having so
obediently followed the no-shifting protocol. Perhaps something about an
over-strict parent encourages a wholesale abandonment of that parent’s
policies. I was around twelve when I bought a 3-speed bike, a basic Sears
model, used. Yes, Sears made bicycles. Don’t believe the Google AI Summary on
this. In fact, here is a photo of a Sears bike that is the spitting image of
the one I had.
Just as in the photo above, my Sears had two handbrakes (and
I don’t know what this says about its age as compared to my Triumph). The rear brake
stopped working (probably a broken cable) and I don’t think I even considered
fixing it. By this point I knew how, but it just didn’t seem important when I
still had a perfectly good front brake. (I also didn’t bother replacing the
broken gear cable connecting the Speed Switch shifter to the Sturmey-Archer
internal 3-speed hub, so this bike was always in third gear, which was the
highest. For this reason its nickname was the Third Speed. Why do I mention the
brand of hub? Well, so I could include some eye candy here.)
Uh, where was I? Oh, yeah, so, I didn’t bother to fix that
rear brake. Nor did I consider riding more carefully. Quite the opposite, in
fact. Exhibit A: my bike ride to Mr. Tomato’s Pizza to meet some friends. Mr.
Tomato’s was at the bottom of the gently down-sloping parking lot of the
Basemar shopping center. It had a huge picture window, and from a distance I
recognized my friends sitting right in front of it. I decided to give them a
good scare, and started sprinting toward them as fast as I could. My plan was
to slam on the brakes (er, brake) just in time to keep from crashing through
the window. Two things failed to occur to me. One was the possibility of a pedestrian
walking along the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. There was an overhang
above this sidewalk, supported at intervals by big pillars that could easily
obscure a shopper from view. The other thing I didn’t consider was the
possibility of my one brake suddenly failing. This is what actually happened.
Just as I hammered the brake, the cable snapped. There was absolutely no way to
stop and I was less than ten feet from that giant window, carrying great speed.
It seemed as though all was lost, but just before impact I
spied one of the pillars, which fortunately had a round cross-section and a
smooth finish. I wrapped that pillar in a bear hug to at least keep myself from
crashing through the window. Amazingly, as my momentum spun me and my bike around
the pillar, the bike ended up pointed along the sidewalk at the moment it
escaped my legs. It went shooting off forward, straight down that sidewalk,
still at great speed.
So wonderful is the design of a bicycle, it can travel a
great distance with no rider, as my brothers and I had learned to our delight
earlier that summer. Not wanting to damage our ten-speeds, we’d conjured up a
beach cruiser whose sole purpose was rider-less travel. (Its Ashtabula
one-piece crankset assembly had fallen out so we couldn’t pedal it around
anyway.) That bike was called Ghost Rider, or Ghostie for short, and we spent
many an afternoon getting it up to speed, one guy riding it and several others
pushing, and when we couldn’t get it going any faster, the rider would jump off
the back and send the bike flying down the street. It could go for several
hundred feet before either tipping over or drifting into a parked car. Well, in
front of Mr. Tomato’s my 3-speed surely set a new record, since its speed was
at least double that of a kid running. It was amazing to behold it flying down the
sidewalk along the storefronts. Fortunately it was a slow business day for that
mall, with no foot traffic. Equally astonishing was that I was completely
unscathed other than perhaps slight damage to my hands and arms, similar to
rope burn. My friends regarded me through the window with complete bewilderment, slack-jawed and
disbelieving. I guess the point of this story is that my dad’s lack of faith in
my intelligence wasn’t entirely unwarranted.
Of course my dad never know about my near-death experience
at Mr. Tomato’s, or indeed of most of the crashes my brothers and I had. But
the very first days of owning our bicycles were not promising. The problem was,
we suddenly had this new hardware but lacked the know-how to use it. As weird
as this may seem, our dad made zero effort to teach us how to ride, and in fact
I am deeply puzzled as to how he even expected us to learn before being presented
with these sophisticated ten-speeds. Did he just think people are born knowing how to ride a bike?
Which brings me to how my brother Max and I did learn, or at
least were given one lesson apiece, on how to ride. No parents were involved,
of course. Max went first. It had come to pass that Geoff and Bryan realized Max
lacked this important skill, and talked their friend R— into loaning out his
bike for the lesson. It was a typical kid’s bike in that it was a one-speed
with high-rise handlebars and a banana seat. (We had a whole saying around
this, that we would chant in mockery of these inferior bikes: “High-rise
handlebar with a roll bar, banana seat, small wheel in front, big wheel in
back, cool-dual frame, rusty old chain, with a slick, streamers from the grips
and flower pedals.” I fact-checked this with Bryan and he remembered like half
of it, and I added a couple details, and Max knew the rest. “Cool-dual frame”
probably pertained to the two extra top-tubes of the Schwinn Sting-Ray, a
popular model in those days. A “slick,” as Max eloquently put it, is “a rear
tire with no tread for monster skids.” “Flower pedals” refers to “dust caps on
the pedals that looked like daisies.”)
Actually, R—’s bike was somewhat unique in that it was an
official licensed Boy Scout bike. But that’s neither here nor there. The more
important detail is the single instruction that Geoff and Bryan gave to Max as
they put him on the bike at the top of Howard Place, a long downhill: “Whatever
you do,
don’t turn!” Max and I
remember it like it was yesterday. So ridiculous. I mean, what was the guy
supposed to
do? They didn’t tell him
how to
brake. They just figured that
his future would work itself out somehow, after he’d built up all that speed!
They set him off, gave him a good push. Now, I just did some research with
Google Maps, and this street ran about 450 feet at an average grade of 5.5%. With
help from ChatGPT (because I’m lazy, not because I needed it) I just calculated
that by the time Max crossed Ithaca Drive (which Howard Place T’s into), he had
to have been going at least 20 mph. He dutifully followed the instruction
not to turn, so it’s a good thing there was to traffic on Ithaca to run him over.
Instead he crashed over a curb, with so much velocity the bike kept going, and
then hit a low fence that stopped him so he tipped over into the grass,
remarkably unhurt. He leapt to his feet, delighted, and cried, “I can ride a
bike, I can ride a bike!”
Alas, that was Max’s only lesson before receiving his ten-speed, months later, on his birthday. I guess he just assumed his skill was
still there. He jumped on the bike and managed to pedal it not only to the end
of our street, Hillsdale Way, but to negotiate the right-hand turn onto Howard
Place (the same street I mentioned earlier), which is a cul-de-sac. He rode to
the top, managed to turn the bike around, and then came barreling back down. In
trying to make the left-hand turn back on to Hillsdale, with my dad and my
brothers and me watching, he clipped a pedal and crashed. He got up, winced at his
road rash, and checked over the bike. A big divot of foam rubber had been
ripped out of the brand-new saddle. Regarding this, he thought to himself (as
he related to me yesterday), “Well, I guess now this bike is really mine.”
Did I do any better? Alas, no. My lesson was a year or so
later. Perhaps having been spooked a bit by Max’s disastrous first effort,
Geoff and Bryan didn’t start me down Howard Place. Instead, they put me on my
friend P—’s bike, another lowly one-speed, at the top of a steep driveway
facing Hillsdale. They gave me a big push and I flew down the driveway,
absolutely frozen in terror, went straight across the street, and crashed into
the curb on the other side. I hadn’t built up nearly as much speed as Max had,
so the curb stopped the front wheel cold and I flipped over the bars. I didn’t
quite clear the sidewalk and landed roughly on it, but was no more hurt than on
any other day, what with all the various skirmishes kids faced during that era
of free-reign bullying. But I can’t say I’d learned any biking technique at
all.
So when, about six months and zero follow-up lessons later,
I got the Fuji Junior, I really didn’t know how to ride. But there was no way I could just stand
there and look at the bike, with my
dad seeming so expectant (apparently notwithstanding Max’s fiery wreck on his bike’s maiden voyage). So I just
winged it, riding down the sidewalk, pedaling furiously because the one thing
my brothers had managed to get across was that speed was the key to balance. I
made it about two houses down before veering off course, heading straight for a
mailbox. I managed not to run into it, but raked my back across it rather
painfully. Somehow I kept the bike upright, and I guess by that point I had the
hang of it. But this first ride on the Fuji Junior couldn’t have impressed my
dad, and may have reminded him of Max’s similar misadventure, and this is
perhaps why my dad decided to declare my bike’s shifters off-limits. Maybe he
felt I had my hands full just learning how to steer the bike. Fortunately, I
did figure out the brakes.
Well, once my fear abated, I fell madly in love with the
bike. As I’ve mentioned before in these pages (in the notes to my “Corn Cob” poem), my Fuji had Suntour shifters and derailleurs, which I noticed when with
great delectation I examined every last feature of the bike. Suntour seemed
like a really cool word. I didn’t grasp at the time that it was brand of
component; I thought Suntour was a sub-brand of the bike, as though Fuji was
the make and Junior was the model and Suntour was the sub-model, like they do
with cars now (e.g., Subaru Outback Expert Sport-Trac, L.L. Bean Edition). I
remember riding up and down the block joyously singing “Sun-TOO-or
BYE-sick-UL!”
One day when the bike was still new, I rode all morning, from
my house up to the end of Howard Place and back down, then all the way down
Hillsdale and back up, then back up Howard and back, over and over again,
whistling the whole while because I was so happy. I happened to notice Mr. S—,
who lived on the corner of Hillsdale and Howard, looking at me funny. He was
out working in his yard and every time I went by he glared at me. What was his
problem? I just shrugged it off. Well, later that day, another neighbor, Mr.
D—, confronted me, asking if I’d vandalized Mr. S—’s house and yard. I was like
“WHAT?!” It happens that Mr. S— had described at length to Mr. D— how I’d
vandalized his place, and then rubbed it in by riding by again and again,
whistling merrily to showcase my Schadenfreude as I watched him clean it up. I
was mortified at this totally false accusation, and declared my innocence to
Mr. D—. He advised that I’d simply have to go over there and knock on Mr. S—’s
door and explain that I wasn’t the vandal. This I did, despite being a very shy
kid, and I was so upset I was crying throughout my denial speech. My river of
tears, it seemed, was mistaken for remorse and contrition by Mr. S—, who
clearly didn’t believe my story of riding by again and again just because I
liked to ride. At least my blubbery speech mollified him sufficiently that he
didn’t see fit to involve my parents. This was a big break, because my parents
never seemed to believe in my innocence, either. My mom once made me go
apologize to yet another neighbor for being part of a cruel pack of kids that
relentlessly teased her dog, even though I told my mom over and over that I
wasn’t involved. Can you imagine how soul-crushing it is to apologize for an
act of animal cruelty you are entirely innocent of?
Okay, time to move on. It was the toward the end of the
summer when, on a day I now see as momentous, Max taught me how to shift my
bike’s gears. We’d pedaled up Table Mesa Drive and were about to descend Vassar
Drive, which is a 5.5% grade. Max, surely tired of waiting for me as I coasted
down such hills (first gear being way too low to be of use), pointed at my
stem-mounted shifters and told me, “Grab those two levers and push them all the
way forward.”
Now, you probably think we’ve finally reached the crux of
this story, after so very many diversions, and will now get to the really
important, life-changing bit, and that’s almost true, but first I need to pause
yet again to explain about these shifters. If you’re old enough to have used
old-school stem- or down-tube-mounted shift levers, and remember how they
worked, you may have raised an eyebrow just now when reading about Max’s instruction
to push both levers forward. On almost any ten-speed-type bike, pushing the
right lever forward would put the chain on the smallest cog in back (making for
a higher gear, exactly as intended), but pushing the left lever forward would put
the chain on the smaller chainring up front (making for a lower gear, at odds with the rest of the shift). You’d also wonder
why, since I always rode in my bike’s lowest gear, both levers would have been
down at the moment Max issued his instruction. On almost any bike, this would
have meant my chain was on the big chainring, corresponding to the higher gear range. The only way you might
have thought, “Oh yeah, of course, this makes sense” is if you’re the kind of
bizarrely knowledgeable bike maven who would recall that the Suntour
derailleur line-up of 1978 included the Spirt model, which
worked backwards from most other derailleurs. As it happened, Max’s
instructions were perfectly accurate for putting my bike in its highest gear.
And this begs the question: if my front derailleur (and thus
left shifter) were essentially backwards from most others, how is it that Max’s
instructions were correct? Wouldn’t he have assumed my bike worked the same as
his? When I started this post, that question wouldn’t stop nagging at me. Now,
if you’re wondering if I’m just remembering it wrong, think again … after all,
this was a life-changing moment, forever seared into my memory. The highly
specific action gave me, even before the gear shift actually took effect, a
very powerful feeling. I knew that these gears were the key to somehow going
faster, though I didn’t have any idea how (because when you think about it, the
behavior of a bike’s gearing only makes sense after the fact, when you know empirically
how gearing works; before that, the notion of differently sized cogs and chainrings
affecting a bike’s speed is highly, highly abstract). The idea that I was somehow
about to unleash great speed was tantalizing, and to achieve this by taking one
hand, applying it to two levers, and pushing them both
all the way forward in one go … it’s like pushing the throttle control
forward on a fighter plane, or, better yet, remember the opening scene in “Risky
Business,” when Tom Cruise’s character
pushes all the levers on his dad’s stereo’s graphic equalizer all the way up, so he can totally rock out? It was just like that.
Determined to get to the bottom of this mystery, I had to
find out if it was possible the front derailleurs on my brothers’ bikes,
meaning Simplex derailleurs (these being Motobécane Nomades), might have also
been backwards. This could have been a convention, after all, because this
arrangement just makes sense. You have one consistent rule—pushing lever forward
= higher gear—instead of the conflicting rule of pulling the left lever down = higher gear while pushing the
right lever forward = higher gear.
This conflicting behavior stymies cycling newcomers. On my wife’s road bike, I
actually put “H” and “L” stickers on the down tube near the shifters to show
which way to move them. It’s one of the more confusing things about
pre-pushbutton shifting.
I couldn’t reach my brothers right away so I consulted ChatGPT.
It assured me that, in fact, Simplex derailleurs were also backwards (vs. more modern shifters), just like the Suntour
Spirt. GPT confidently declared, “The circa 1975 Simplex shift lever was pushed
forward (toward the front wheel) to move the chain to the big ring. As a
result, the lever would end up in a vertical or forward-leaning position when
in the big ring.” Had it stopped there, I might have been fooled by a classic
AI hallucination. But GPT went on to say, “This action corresponded to pushing
the shift lever forward (since the shift lever pulls cable as it rotates
forward).” Of course this is wrong. The shift lever pulls cable when you pull
it down. So I asked it to furnish
photos and diagrams. It provided a photo of a mid-‘80s Shimano Dura-Ace front derailleur (useless); a drawing of a Simplex rear derailleur (also useless); a photo
looking from the left at a ‘90s-era triple crankset (ditto); and a photo of a
bottom bracket with chainwheels in the background (noticing any trend here,
i.e., useless?). Then it described these visual aids in exhaustive, needless, and
useless detail.
I pointed out its error, challenging the notion that pushing
a shift lever forward would ever tension
the cable, whereupon GPT completely backpedaled (pun intended, couldn’t resist)
and recanted everything it had said
earlier, saying, “You nailed it!” and providing a totally new answer to my
original question: “No, Simplex front derailleurs (like the Prestige models
used on Motobécanes in the mid-1970s) were not
reverse-spring designs like the SunTour Spirt.”
But wait, I’m not done. Disgusted by ChatGPT’s blithe
ineptitude, I asked it to furnish a diagram and a photo to illustrate its
revised explanation of Simplex’s shifting. Look what it came up with:
Can you believe that? For all its detailed description
(running over 1,600 words in all), ChatGPT apparently had
no concept of the cable actuation. Look at the arrow pointing from
the “Cable” label … it has no head, goes nowhere! No cable is shown! And look
at the arrow showing the motion of the lever: it’s 90 degrees off of the actual
motion. And since when is the lever mounted directly to the derailleur? Where
would the cable even
be?
Actually, in fairness, I know of at least one front
derailleur that was actuated by a
handle instead of a cable. It was on an ancient Schwinn Collegiate that I
bought from a police auction. The rear derailleur had a normal shifter and
cable setup, but that front derailleur had a handle. At least it did, for a while, until my pant leg
caught it one day during hard pedaling and ripped it clean off the bike. But
this wasn’t a Simplex derailleur; I’m pretty sure it was a Huret (though it was
labeled “Schwinn Approved” in keeping with the fiction that this was an
all-American bike). That derailleur looked something like this:
Getting back to ChatGPT, its drawing wasn’t even the worst
of its crimes. Look at this fake photo it generated of what it imagined that
Simplex front shifting system looked like:
I thought for a second this was an actual photo of some
bizarre ill-fated real-life setup, but look at the ersatz brand stamped into
the shift lever, in a nonexistent alphabet. The entire rendering is just grotesque.
In fact, for me, and I suppose anyone else who has great familiarity with bicycle
components, this mock photo is deep into uncanny valley territory, to the
extent it’s almost nauseating. Also note how the derailleur
cage doesn’t clear the chainring teeth. Artificial intelligence my ass!
Suffice to say, Simplex derailleurs of that era weren’t backwards and nothing can
explain Max’s spot-on instructions. When I asked him he simply admitted, “I
don’t have an answer for you. Geoff and Bryan probably made the observation so
it must have been common knowledge. I know I didn’t discover that on my own.”
Bryan theorized that Max had taken my bike out for a few joy rides and
discovered it that way; Max could neither confirm nor deny this. The perfect
accuracy of his instruction shall have to remain a mystery.
But oh, when I pushed those levers forward, and that bike
went from first to tenth gear … it was breathtaking. I mashed the pedals with
everything I had, working hard to get on top of that 52x14 top gear, until I
was just flying down Vassar. I’d had
no idea just how effective pedaling in “the big meat” (as a bike’s highest gear
is known by racers) could be. It’s like if you had what you thought was a Fred
Flintstone car, propelled by your feet paddling the ground, and then one day
you discovered that this car had an engine. What a game-changer. It was like I
went from patsy to made man in the span of a minute.
Not only did this sudden knowledge change my cycling, but it
forever changed how I regarded my dad’s authority. Not only would I use all my
gears from that day forward, but I’d have this secret I’d be keeping from him.
It was impossible for me to revert to the lowly, gutless, quaking obeyer of
rules; I was like, fuck that guy! He kept this gearing magic from me! He kept
me down! I felt like Toecutter in Mad Max: “The bronze, they keep you from being proud.”
As it turned out, I never did get in trouble for defying my dad. An absentminded fellow, he evidently forgot he’d ever issued that
prohibition. Or who knows, maybe on some level he wanted me to take some
initiative. But most likely he’d intended to one day teach me all about
shifting, but just forgot. Maybe he’d have thought a little harder about this
if he’d had any inkling that his silly rule, coupled with Max’s intervention,
would turn me into a lifelong rebel…
—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet
posts, click here.
