On Riding a Bike

Since I tore a ligament in my foot (which is really just another way of saying I sprained my ankle, but a torn ligament sounds so much more sports-injury-y), I’ve been riding my bike for exercise.

Every morning, I get up and go for a ride.  I ride through my own neighborhood, then walk my bike along a very short dirt path under a railway trestle and ride in another neighborhood for about an hour and a half. 

It’s a good work-out, but I don’t like doing it nearly as much as I like to run.

Today, as I rode, I tried to figure out why this is.  I remembered living in Berkeley when I was nine.  Every day after school, I would retrieve my three-geared bike from the garage (which I remember feeling at the time was an arduous procedure) and go for an afternoon ride.  I would pack a snack in my bike pack (a thrilling accessory purchased with my own money) and ride to the end of a court right above and behind the Claremont Hotel.  There, I would ride down a narrow dirt path to a cement staircase that rose high into the Berkeley Hills.  I would sit at the base of the stairs and eat my snack and watch the workers behind the hotel load food and ice into the kitchen.  And listen to the eucalyptus trees groan in an eerie, magical way as their trunks rubbed against each other.

Back then, I didn’t ride my bike for exercise.  I rode because I loved the intentionality and the power involved in getting myself somewhere on my own.  Riding back home, I took the descending hill at full speed, out of the saddle.  I didn’t use my brakes, and I didn’t wear a helmet.  I felt completely invincible.

Now when I ride, I wear a helmet.  (Of course I wear a helmet: I’d be a moron if I didn’t.)  I track my miles on an app.  I use my brakes liberally.  I worry about hitting one of those hard little eucalyptus gumnuts that litter the roads after a storm and losing my balance and ending up unconscious in the middle of the street. I futz around with one of twenty-one speeds.  I buy special bike-riding clothes.  I stop at stop signs.

It’s more fun the other way, the way it was when I was nine.  But I’m not nine anymore.  I don’t know how to go back to that other way.

Memory, 1982

In 1982, my then-husband and I moved to Berkeley so I could go to graduate school.  My friend Jim got us an apartment in the building next door to his.  Growing around the front door was a huge, trailing jasmine in full bloom.  My mother stood under the doorframe and said, For the rest of your life, when you smell jasmine, you will remember this place.

It was a very ordinary one-bedroom apartment on the third floor.  It had an ancient kitchen with pale yellow tiles edged in black, and shag carpeting that Jim described as “owl-shit green.”  The ex and I slept on a platform bed in the dark bedroom, under a blue and white-flowered Laura Ashley quilt. We had a black-and-white TV in there.  It was about the size of a toaster.  I remember watching Michael Jackson do the moonwalk on that TV.

We didn’t cook a lot, or rather, we didn’t cook well.  I made a lot of pasta (which Neil Heidler ate too much of and threw up all over the owl-shit green carpeting).  The ex gloried in a dish of his own devising: vegetables sautéed in our big, red wok, then mixed with cream of mushroom soup and served over rice.  Needless to say, we ate out a lot.  On a limited budget, we often went to La Fiesta, a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant on Telegraph.  Strawberry sodas and cockroaches on the walls.  Blue tiles inlaid on the tables.  Still the best Mexican food I ever ate.  I wonder if it’s still there.

I remember sitting cross-legged on the bed and doing accounting problems.  Standing by the bookcase in the hallway so I could talk on the phone.  Watching my husband perform at a terrible little club on Shattuck whose name escapes me, nicknamed “The Toilet” by the other musicians who were drawn in by free beers.

One of our neighbors was a woman named Andrea, and we got to be good friends.  She was working on a doctorate in archaeology and wanted to meet men in the worst way.  We used to laugh a lot, but I can’t remember why anymore.  We lost touch.

My close friend Sherry lived across town.  Every Thursday night, I would go over to her apartment and watch Cheers and Hill Street Blues.  (I think Thursday was the night the ex played at the Toilet.)  Sherry had a huge crush on Ted Danson.  I loved Daniel Travanti.  Sherry and I aren’t friends anymore.  I miss her so much.

The ex and I went to Tilden Park almost every weekend.  We rode the merry-go-round.  I always got a brick of pink popcorn at the concession stand.

He liked to jog, in those days.  It staggers me to remember that I did absolutely no exercise at all. 

I thought about all this this morning as I jogged past a house about a mile away from mine.  In the yard, a huge hedge of jasmine bloomed.  It almost stopped me in my tracks.