Speed Cycling

Last week riding home from my office, I latched onto the draft of a large pick-up truck pulling a huge fifth wheel travel trailer or, as they call them now, RV.  It had just gone past the intersection at which I had a stop sign.  It was clear for me to proceed.  The RV was not going 20 mph, so I sprinted to get in its draft.  I rode with my front wheel about six feet off its bumper.  The truck slowly accelerated.  The rode curved slightly, and the RV looked heavily loaded as with each bump or dip it seemed to rock and roll a bit.  Eventually it got up to 35 mph.  I rode in the path of the left, driver’s side wheel in case there were any road killed raccoons or ground hogs.  I assumed that the driver would try to avoid directly running over road kill, since that too might bounce the trailer around.  Slowly the pace climbed to above 45 mph.  I did not look back.  I kept my vision focused on the rear bumper.  I assumed that, given how slowly the driver accelerated, when it came time to slow down, the driver would decelerate slowly; there wouldn’t be any sudden increases or decreases in speed.  I could pedal half a dozen strokes, then coast.  I didn’t know if I could stay in the draft.  I thought that if I stayed close enough, within six feet, I’d have a chance.  The speed limit for that section of road is 50 or 55 mph.  If I got out of the draft I’d quickly slow to 20 mph.  After two miles, he began to slow down for an approaching stop sign.  At the stop, he and I turned left.  I again accelerated with him.  But one-quarter mile down the road, he turned right and I needed to go straight.  Shortly after, another driver in a pick-up truck passed me, and yelled something out the window.  I didn’t comprehend what he said, but it did not seem unfriendly.  I am sure it was an extremely unusual sight for him to see a bicyclist going over 45 mph, something to tell the dog, wife, and kids about.  It is certainly not the sort of thing sung about in country music.  When I got home, I checked my cyclocomputer and it showed a maximum speed of 47 mph.  That is likely the fastest I have gone on my bike in a couple of years.

The first time I went fast was during the first bike race I entered.  The race was a circuit road race.  The circuit was five miles, and we did six laps of it.  I have ridden my bicycle a lot since I was a young kid.  I grew up ten miles from the nearest small town.  Over two miles from our house was Wright, where there was a Catholic church and elementary school, a bar, and a corner store.  Back then they called them corner stores; now they call them convenience stores.  They might have a few grocery items, but mostly they were places to stop to get candy, ice cream, sodas.  They might have sold cigarettes, but more likely you would have to go next door to the bar to get them out of a machine.  No beer, wine, or liquor.  Again, you got that next door.  Probably didn’t even have milk, as as most folks I knew had a milkman who delivered once or twice weekly.  By the time I was eight, I could ride, usually with a sister or two, up to Wright.  Along the way we’d pick up beer bottles to return for deposits at the bar to get money for candy or ice cream novelties.  The bar felt like such a forbidden place: dark even in the middle of the day, cool, smoky, only men in there, unless the owner’s wife was tending, and most of them were retired farmers.  When the owner’s wife was tending, it would not draw a younger or a female crowd.  It is just that she was the only woman I ever saw in the bar.  Beer was served in six or eight ounce glasses.  Probably only Stroh’s and Pabst or Schlitz.  And no light beers, as they had not yet been invented.  A couple of times each year we, my sisters and I, would ride our bikes the ten miles to school.  Nobody locked their bikes.  By the time I was in junior high and high school, I would more regularly ride ten miles to friends’ houses.  When I turned sixteen and got a driver’s license, the bike was more a child’s toy.  I still would pack it in my car, take it to a girlfriend’s house to go for a summer bike ride with a girlfriend.  But it ceased to be transportation; it was recreation.  Then in graduate school in my early twenties, I started riding the bike more for transportation, and some for exercise.  When my children came along, I got the kiddie seat for the rear of the bike to take my kids for bike rides.  From those days in my early twenties onward, I have worn a helmet while cycling.  In my mid-thirties, I was doing a lot of running and races.  I developed plantar fasciitis.  So for my distance workouts, I rode my bike, keeping the running for speed-work over shorter distances.  Eventually as my kids got older, when they were in fourth or fifth grade, and I could afford it, I got an entry level racing bike during a November end of season sale.  And next May, I entered my first race.

The race had about thirty-five entrants.  Since I was new, the race director advised that I not ride in the midst of the pack, but at the back where it would be safer.  I thought he meant “safer for me,” but in fact he meant “safer for the rest of the riders.”  I didn’t heed his advice.  I had been reading about bicycle racing, and had learned some of the basics.  Two chief basic prinicples are “don’t overlap your front wheel with a rider’s rear wheel,” and “ride a straight line.”  If your front wheel is overlapped and the rider ahead makes a quick lateral movement bumping your front wheel, you will most likely become intimately acquainted with the asphalt, and he will only hear the metal grinding on pavement behind him.  Given that in bicycle racing the uniform is next to nothing, sliding on pavement is going to hurt.  I heard someone say that if you have never raced and crashed on a bicycle and want to know what it is like, strip down to your underwear, get in a friend’s car, have them get up to about 25 mph or so, then jump out the door.  Don’t’ overlap your front wheel, and the corresponding principle which is to keep the rider ahead from sending a rider behind who may not have adhered to principle one down to the pavement: ride a straight line.  I knew both principles, so I rode in the midst of the pack.  The pack started out slowly, maybe 18-21 mph.  A mile down the course we had a right turn, and were now riding with a 15 mph tailwind.  A half-mile down the road, there was a slight downhill, and the race was on.  In short order we were going 37 mph, and I felt like screaming with giddy excitement.  That was such a rush, so much fun.  Another mile ahead, and we were heading into a right turn, going about 30 mph.  Lean, lean, make it through the corner, everyone upright, hold your line.  Second lap, I start to get spit out the back.  Heading down the hill into the corner, I am gapped off but trying to get back on.  I enter the corner too fast, realize I am not going to make it through the corner without skidding out and sliding nearly naked on the pavement.  So I straighten the bike up and brake hard.  I know I am going to go off the far side of the road.  It is early May.  There is no ditch.  The fields are freshly tilled and planted.  It is a smooth run off, like the paths along mountain highways for tractor-trailer rigs whose brakes fail them, with sand or very loose gravel to slow them to a halt.  I ride into the field, come to a complete stop, get off the bike, carry it back to the road, and get going again, well off the back of the pack with no chance to catch back on.

A year or two after that I was up near Benzonia, Michigan.  There are some steep short hills around there.  I found one southwest of Benzonia that I could hit 50 mph on.  There was another road that was steeper, Traverse Avenue or Walker Street, heading east off the main street.  I probably could have gone over 50 on that, except that there was stop sign at the bottom, at the point where you’d hit top speed.  I suppose I could have had someone at the stop sign to let me know half way down if traffic was clear and I could bomb through the stop sign.  On the long downhill heading south to Hoxeyville, with a tailwind I could get over 45 mph on that hill, with a bit of work.  There were some good hills around the Manistee River, around High Bridge and Red Bridge where I could get over 40 mph.  On Caberfae Road, heading toward Harietta, there is a good downhill that I could get close to 50 mph.  Most of those were long enough, just not steep enough.

Also in the late 1990s, two or three times I did a cycling tour with friends in early autumn in southeast Ohio, in the Ohio Appalachians.  They were two-day rides, about 110 miles each day, with about 5000 feet of climbing (and descending) each day.  Many of the descents were steep, many allowing speeds of over 45 mph.  My fastest was 52 mph.  That was on a winding road.  I descended it riding from gutter to gutter, from guard rail to guard rail.  I remember a short section with gravel on the road.  I remember blind corners where I was praying that no one was coming up the hill.  I quickly got a reputation for being a very fast descender.  “Eric the Eagle” one guy called me.  With a small pack of five or seven riders, you could go faster downhill by “tumbling” in a rotating paceline.  The rider to the front pulled over to the side to drift to the back of the group.  As soon as the next rider was clear of the rider who had just pulled to the side, he pulled to the side too.  The group continued to rotate, with no one being out front in the wind for more than a few seconds, drafting and bombing down the hill.  I got with one such group which included a tandem.  Given gravity, a bike with two riders weighed more than two bikes with a rider each, and it had less rolling and wind resistance.  The tandem could lead down the hill, with it almost impossible for anyone to pass.  On one downhill section, there was a rough looking, Appalachian old man in an older beat up Buick behind us.  After we descended that hill and got to the flat land, going perhaps 24 mph, he passed us.  As he passed us, he rolled down his window.  We wondered if we were going to get yelled at for being on his road.  Instead, with a partially toothless grin we got “y’all wir gawn bout fordy five dawn thet heel.”  I guess we made his day, almost as good as having a friend give you a pint jar of his newly distilled moonshine.  Not to stereotype or anything.

My fastest ride was in the early 2000s in northern Kentucky, west of Covington, between the Cincinnati Northern Kentucky Airport and the Ohio River to the west.  There are some steep hills around there.  I was on a ride on unfamiliar roads.  But from looking at the map, with none of the roads going straight I knew it was hilly.  After peaking one hill, a dump truck just passed me as we began to go downhill.  I got onto its draft, riding about six to eight feet off its tailgate.  I assumed that if it could go fast, the corners could not be too sharp.  The speed climbed.  I hoped the truck would not kick up rocks, that there would be no potholes, and that there would be no road kill.  That is asking for a lot in northern Kentucky roads.  I got all I asked for.  The road had very gentle curves, such that the dump truck driver could pretty much go the speed limit and more.  By the time the road leveled off near the Ohio River valley and I could check my cyclocomputer, the maximum speed registered was 57 mph.  What a thrill!  On a twenty pound bike with tires about 23 mm (less than an inch) wide.

Mid-Summer Therapies

It was a hot Independence Day weekend Saturday.  I went for a bike ride, leaving the house about 10 am.  It was about 75 degrees, but it felt a lot hotter, maybe because of the humidity.  I went west three miles, then north fifteen miles to M-21, east five miles to DeWitt Road, just a mile west of St. Johns, south through DeWitt and back to our house, 40 miles total.  It was an aromatherapy ride.  Heading north toward M-21, I went by several mint fields on the west side of the road.  St. Johns calls itself the Mint Capital of the World, with a Mint Festival in mid-August.  While it might have been 75 degrees when I started, it seemed to warm quickly into the mid 80s.  With the heat and humidity and the wind from the west, the mint seemed to be giving off scent more strongly.  That was nice.  Deep green fields of mint.  Healthful smells.  Heading south from M-21 back toward DeWitt, I rode past a couple of dairy operations on the west side of the road.  So with the heat, humidity, and west wind, the scent was strong.  Dairy operations give off a sweet manure smell, less offensive than the beef operations.  I suppose it has to do with the feed.  And dairy cattle need a lot of water.  A Holstein averages about eight gallons a day.  The record Holstein, set in Wisconsin in 2009, averaged 23 gallons a day.  It had to be drinking over 30 gallons a day.  Maybe the farmer had it on a huge IV drip to get that much fluid into her system.

I suppose it was also a visual therapy ride.  The mint fields were a rich green.  The wheat is turning to golden, in preparation for harvest within a month.  I did the ride at a moderately hard pace.  When I got done about noon, it felt close to 90 degrees.  I was hot.  We had the sprinklers going, and I got in the sprinklers to cool my body off more quickly.  Pasty white chest, moderate reddish color from the sun tan on my arms and legs.  Light tan of the dried clay fields around the house.  It is quite a shock to the body to have that sixty degree water, especially on my back or chest.  It is fine on my legs, but takes my breath away when it sprays on my chest.  Rainbows in each droplet as the sun shines through them.  Sunday morning I went on another sort of aromatherapy ride.  I rode my single speed with the panniers, to collect cans.  Over a 20 mile ride, I passed about 20 dead raccoons, skunks, opossums.  The previous day’s heat cooked the greasy and slimy road kill to a wretched smell.  The heat bloats the carcasses until they burst, spewing or oozing stomach and intestinal contents, urging flies and vultures to come to dinner.  Not much visual therapy there.  Grey-green slime just does not strike me as visually appealing.

Then there was some aural therapy.  Friday night we went to a show, “Keep on The Sunny Side,” a two hour long musical play about A.P. Carter, Sara Carter and Maybelle Carter.  It was highly entertaining and the quality of the music was very good.  The woman playing Maybelle perhaps played guitar better than Maybelle did, and probably sang better too.  Maybelle picked out melodies and harmonies on the guitar.  Maybelle played a Gibson L-4 (I think), an archtop acoustic guitar (the L-4 became electric, and now the L-7 is their acoustic archtop, close to $6,000); the actress who played Maybelle played a guitar very similar in appearance to the Gibson L-7.  Sara played autoharp.  A.P. played folk guitar.  For the show, they got vintage instruments, very nice.  The show included two dozen of their songs: Keep on the Sunny Side, Are You Lonesome Tonight?, Worried Man Blues, Are you Tired of Me, My Darling?, Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow, Church in the Wildwood, I Never Will Marry, Lonesome Valley, My Clinch Mountain Home, among them.  Some of their performances nearly brought tears to my eyes.  Most of those songs, if not all of them, I have heard played first by other actors.  I heard “I Never Will Marry” about six years ago for the first time by the Peasall Sisters.  In the play, after A.P. and Sara have separated, and A.P. is still passionately in love with Sara while Sara wants to move on in her life, posed at opposite sides of the stage they sing “I Never Will Marry.”  That was painful to watch.  Maybe more painful was to watch A.P. sing “Are you Tired of Me My Darling?” to Sara just after she discussed leaving him.  That one I think I first heard from Emmylou Harris or Nanci Griffith.  I think I first heard “Worried Man Blues” from Woody Guthrie or Johnny Cash.  The play was sweet, funny, sad.  A.P. and Sara were married young.  A.P. travelled a lot trying to get record deals and book shows. Sara stayed home and raised the kids.  She got tired of him being gone so much, and ended up divorcing him.  A.P. and Maybelle (Sara’s cousin who had married A.P.’s brother) and other Carter family members continued to perform and make records.  Sara performed with them only on rare occasion.  A.P. sure wrote some beautiful songs.  One of Maybelle’s daughters (June) married Johnny Cash.  The show did my heart well.  The actor who played A.P. and the actress who played Sara are getting married this month.  I wonder how it felt to play characters who had a rocky relationship that ended in separation, just as you, the players, are about to set out on your own marriage.  Would it make you aware of the kinds of conflicts and challenges that are likely to arise?  Would it prepare you to learn how to address challenges to your marriage?  Would you more likely have a rewarding and surviving marriage?

When we got home Friday night after the show, our neighbor was shooting off big fireworks.  They had stopped by earlier in the week to give me a flyer and invitation to join them around 8 pm for a party in their back yard, with fireworks show after dark.  I thought they’d be over with by the time we got home from the play.  But no, they went on for twenty minutes after we got home.  And I thought they’d be not too flashy, ones that would go as high as your house, or were ground fireworks of flash and light.  But no, they were commercial quality.  I was stunned how impressive the show was.  A really good fireworks show gives me the analogy of a THC-induced laugh.  I can’t control the joy of the visual candy, the light and color against a dark night sky.  I would not be surprised if he had spent over $2000 on fireworks.  Lansing downtown was to have fireworks July 4.  We went to their Independence Day parade around the state capitol at mid-day.  What a dud of a parade!  No marching bands, no floats.  There were a bunch of tow trucks, a bunch of customized cars (late 1980s two-door Oldsmobiles, for example, with large diameter low-profile tires, cars jacked-up, glittery paint jobs, loud stereos, doors that are hinged to open vertically rather than horizontally), an adopt-a-pet group, some pony league football teams, a few dance groups (belly dancers—gave a whole new meaning to being a belly dancer, several ballet groups, Mexican folk dancers, cloggers), and I almost forgot the local flat track roller derby team, the Mitten Mavens.  The Mavens’ website says “no experience required,” and it showed.  But I suppose as mavens, some of them have some sort of trusted expertise that they hope to pass on to others, expertise on flinging elbows, dodging opponents’ elbows, jamming, pivoting, blocking, not to mention roller skating.  Overall, it was laughable for a parade.  It seemed like anyone who wanted to could walk or ride the parade route and wave at people sitting at the curbs.  Maybe that was the point.  Maybe the organizers were post-modernists trained in the craft of poking fun at us the audience.  I told Beth she should have decorated her bike and joined the parade. The Memorial Day parade in Coleman, MI (pop. 1229) was better than the Independence Day Parade in downtown Lansing.  Given that, we decided not to go to the downtown fireworks show.  We were going to attend, but after the parade, we were not confident that Lansing could put on a good fireworks show.  There was also one in St. Johns, about fifteen miles from us past the mint fields, but we stayed home.

A week before Independence Day, I rode 88 miles.  It was the first I had ridden in two weeks.  During the group ride, the leader and I broke away from the group for four miles leading to a sprint.  We were working right at our limit, very very hard, 24-32 mph.  Coming to the sprint, he led me, but the sprinters from the bunch just caught me about 30 yards from the line, and I took third.  Shortly after that, about 35 miles into my 88 mile ride, my calves started cramping.  I worked on cramp-therapy management: pedal easy, don’t put in hard efforts, stay in the draft, drink a lot, have an energy gel.  On and off for the rest of the group ride my legs were cramping.  Then on the ride back home, about twenty miles, it seemed like every muscle in my legs were cramping.  If there are such muscles as toe-flexors, they were cramping.  If I tried to push very hard on the pedals, my calves and quadriceps cramped.  If I pulled up on the pedals, my hip flexors and tibialis anterior cramped.  At one point, I almost had to stop pedaling.  I’d never had it that bad.  The very hard and long effort after not riding two weeks, and insufficient energy intake (drinking only water, not an energy drink) is what did it.  Stopping at a drinking fountain, I drank a bottle full of water and had an energy bar, and was fine the rest of the way home (except that I got two flats over the last seven miles to home).  That night I thought my sleep would be miserable, and my legs would cramp in the night.  But when I got home I pursued further cramp therapy.  I drank a recovery drink, and fixed two grilled tuna sandwiches.  The recovery drink and the protein in the tuna was perfect. In the future, I am taking Cytomax (like Gatorade, but a different brand).  I hadn’t been taking it since I haven’t been training to race, and figured water was good enough.  Plus energy drink spills on my bike making a sticky mess, and the bike needs to be washed after the ride.  I’ll wash my bike and hope to avoid such severe leg cramps.  I did about 250 miles this past week.  Fat-burning therapy.

Finally, my garden is growing well.  The zinnias are starting to flower.  I have picked three green peppers.  Tomatoes are coming, but I am not sure they will be good.  I expect to get beans in about a week.  I transplanted a cantaloupe from in the garden to just outside, and also a tomato plant that was growing wild.  Maybe they will take and produce something.  I had to spray again for the small beetles that are eating the leaves of the bean plants.  What kind of therapy is growing a garden?  It seems to me a kind of therapy, to take a bunch of seeds, till a garden area with a shovel and spade fork, smooth it with a rake, mark rows, plant seeds, weed and water the garden, tend it, watch it grow, harvest it and enjoy the harvest.  Maybe it is geo-therapy.  Becoming healthful and attuned toward the earth, from which I came and to which I will return.

Stuff Envy

This spring we got involved in a book discussion small group that met most Thursday evenings.  This past week the small group had its end of season meal together.  We first drove four miles to the house of the people who hosted the small group, and rode with them to the house of the people hosting the meal, about 25 miles east and a bit north, in a remote area of Clinton County.  On the drive, I saw a fawn nursing, a couple other does and fawns, and a pair of sandhill cranes with a pair of chicks.  We rode in a $50,000 Suburban.  The couple is in their early 60s.  Dan is a dentist, and does a lot of dental mission work.  Chris was a school teacher.  They go on vacations to Costa Rica, Cancun, and just got back from an eleven day cruise along the north coast of the Mediterranean from Barcelona to Yugoslavia.  Dan has 40 acres up north that he maintains and grooms for deer hunting.  He goes out west regularly to hunt.  On the two-story wall of their living room above the fireplace is a big elk head and antlers.  In his garage are numerous mule deer racks and other mounts.  I'd estimate the value of their primary home and property at $700,000 or more.  On the way to the meal, we picked up the widow from our group, also in her early 60s.  She lives in a large home with a three stall garage.  Given her house, lot, and neighborhood, I'd value her property above $250,000. The house we went to for the meal is another large and elegant house, on twenty acres.  The value of that is well above $500,000.  He is an engineer, about retired, and she has taught public school for twenty some years.  They have gone on numerous cruises too, and just got back from a weekend at Gatlinburg to a gospel music festival.  Another couple in our group both have full-time jobs, one as an engineer the other has worked secretarial work at one place for almost 40 years.  They have one of those $40,000 pick-up trucks and a large fifth wheel, and take long vacations around the country.  They too have gone on cruises around the Mediterranean.  The final couple are recent retirees.  I am guessing he is 62, she is late 50s.  He worked electrical engineering in relation to methane gas from landfills.  She was a paraprofessional at the local schools.  They have 20 acres and a cabin on Drummond Island where they go often.  All the couples had gone to the local schools years ago, and have lived in the same area for 40 years or more, actually 60 years (since they were born). It was a bit of a depressing evening.  My wife Beth and I both got depressed or envious or jealous or something.

Four years ago I was lured to what looked like a very good job move.  In hindsight, it was a financial disaster, although it was good in other respects.  The housing market began its nose-dive as we moved.  The house we moved out of lost over 25% in equity, about $50,000.  The house we bought in the higher cost housing market we moved to cost $100,000 more than we sold our previous home for.  Two and a half years into the new job, the company announced that they were cutting my position, sending me packing after begging me to come.  We depleted our savings after finding another job and having to pay our own moving expenses, plus all the expenses that go with buying another house.  For eleven months we had been paying two mortgages and utilities on two homes, putting out 70% of my monthly take-home income in housing.  When that house from our most previous location sold, we lost just over 20% in equity, another $55,000.  The home we currently live in we purchased for $40,000 less than we sold our most previous home.  So where as four years ago we owed 20% of the value of our home (and had 80%, about $150,000, in equity), now we owe just under 80% of the value of our home (and have only 20%, about $30,000, in equity).  In other words, we have lost about $120,000 of equity in four years.  Beth has a 2009 Honda Civic, a great car, with about 38,000 miles.  I usually ride a bicycle to work.  But when I have to drive I have a 1995 Dodge Grand Caravan.  It has only about 150,000 miles.  The dashboard gauges don’t work, so I don’t get readouts on speed, engine temperature, oil pressure, or fuel.  It would cost about $1000 to repair.  I keep a sheet of paper and write down my estimate of how many miles I drive, and how many gallons of gas I put in it.  I estimate fuel usage, and so far have kept from running out of gas.  Beth has a GPS (purchased at a pawn shop), and if I need to take a trip more than ten miles or on the highway, I use the GPS to give me my speed and set the cruise control when I get up to speed.  We rarely go out to eat or buy take-out, maybe once or twice a month.  We do not buy prepared foods, but cook from scratch.  We are trying to live as frugally as we can, given our income and expenses.  We don’t have vacation plans, except to take time off from work and do things that cost only gas money (free parks, lakes, rivers, window shopping, and so on).  We don't buy books or rent DVDs, but use the public library collection.  Three months ago I got a slightly beat up canoe for free.  When I go fishing, I don’t practice “catch and release.”  A couple hours fishing can be a meal or two for us.  When we ride our bicycles, we pick up cans and bottles for the ten cent deposits.  Beth is a very frugal grocery shopper, looking for sales, using coupons, and organizing her shopping route for efficiency of fuel costs.

The other members of our book discussion small group have lots of money and stuff.  Lots of things and lots of places visited.  On the drive back from the meal, we saw dozens of deer in the fields while the one couple was telling us all about their Mediterranean cruise.  Then they asked us “and so where are you going this summer?  What are your vacation plans?”  I felt like saying “sitting in our back yard watching our grass and garden grow.  Maybe too we will take the old bent canoe I got for free out for cruises on Muskrat Lake, maybe a few trips down the Looking Glass River.  Oh, and we will take a trip to Minnesota to visit our children and help them move out of our house that is finally selling, for which we will still owe $7000 at closing.”  They don’t mean to make us envious, and they are genuine and plain folk, not snooty about their wealth, and are generous with numerous charities.  I have known folks who are not at all humble about all their great possessions and how, all by their own efforts, they have come to possess them.  The folks in the book discussion group are not like that at all.  In fact, before seeing their properties I had no expectation that they were the Gotbucks.  I was quite surprised when I saw their properties.  But the feelings of envy arise anyway.

I get over it quickly.  I have so much to be grateful for.  My 26 and 24 year old children, Kevin and Jayne got through college without great expense, and with almost no loans to pay off.  They both got a very good high school and college education, which can take them far.  They both are mature, positive, and responsible.  I am grateful for Beth, for all she has done for me and meant to me.  I am grateful for a good job, one that pays me enough and the work is meaningful.  I am grateful that I make enough that Beth doesn’t have to work, that we can be well-content without double incomes, and that my job is only 40 hours a week so I can spend time with Beth and doing things I enjoy.  I am grateful for our house, the nicest house we have lived in.  I like our location, living the closest to our parents and siblings since 1980.  Every morning when I head out on my bicycle to work, almost the first prayer in my head as I ride off is gratitude to God for the nice bikes I have, for the health and fitness and skills to ride my bike to work.  I am thankful for the church community we found here.  I am thankful for our book discussion small group.  I am thankful for the banged up canoe I got so I can cruise Muskrat Lake and float the Looking Glass River.  I know that, in terms of quality of water, food, healthcare, disposable income, opportunities for leisure and recreation, education, safety, and all sorts of other measures, I have it better than 99% of the people in the world.  It sounds like I am trying to convince myself.

A proverb (30.7-9) asks:
Two things I ask of you, LORD;
   do not refuse me before I die:
Keep falsehood and lies far from me;
   give me neither poverty nor riches,
   but give me only my daily bread.
Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you
   and say, ‘Who is the LORD?’
Or I may become poor and steal,
   and so dishonor the name of my God.

I heard someone read the line "give me only my daily bread" in a translation that said "give me only enough."  I liked that.  I have enough.  Sometimes, however, that doesn't keep me from stuff envy.

Twice Baptized

Like my dad, whose namesake I am, I have been baptized twice.  Sort of.  Like everything similar, it is different.  I am, after all, a unique individual, just like everyone else.

My dad’s mom, whom I never met because she died of breast cancer at least two years before I was born, was a Calhoun, Irish or Ulster Scots, whichever it is not preventing me from feeling like I can legitimately celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, claiming to be one-quarter Irish.  To say I celebrate it is a bit of an overstatement.  I wear a little green, or greenish, clothing, which looks good with my skin and hair color which, before I grayed, was auburn, while when I grew beards in my twenties and thirties they were red.  That is the complete extent of my celebration of St. Padraig’s day.  So I say Irish, not Ulster Scots.  Only my one sister, on whose third birthday I was born, thinks it important to distinguish the Irish from Ulster Scots because her husband thinks he is very Scots and thinks he knows the specific clan Tartan and Crest, although I always took his comments as puffery to make his heritage sound like it was worth something.  She, my dad’s mom, was a Free Methodist, which my sister, for all I can imagine, probably disputes saying she was a Wesleyan or Nazarene, as if anyone except a Free Methodist, Wesleyan, or Nazarene knows, or for that matter, cares about the difference.  Since she, my dad’s mom, died before I was born, I never knew her, even to the point of not knowing her first name, which I barely recall having heard as Leonore or Lenore or Lenora.  The pencil pushers at Ellis Island said my dad’s mom’s ancestors were Irish, so I am sticking to the one-quarter Irish position.

My dad’s dad, whom I knew pretty well as my only grandpa, because my mom’s dad died when she was only four or five years old, was a German Catholic, Carl, and took seriously his Catholicism.  At least it seemed so to me.  In his red four-door 1961 Mercury Comet with fins on the back, hanging from the mirror was a St. Christopher medal, not that it provided fool-proof protection.  Five or seven years after my dad and mom got married, my dad’s widowed dad married my mom’s widowed mother, making my parents in some sense step-brother and step-sister, but beyond the age when people would have been able to worry about weird and kinky things going on between them.  Not that weird and kinky things weren’t going on between them, but since they were half a dozen years into their marriage together, which at the present moment has continued well for over sixty years, one should permit some weird and kinky things.  My oldest sister was riding in the Comet between my grandpa, my dad’s dad, and my grandma, my mom’s mother, who were legally husband and wife then past their tenth year anniversary at least, when they got in an accident well before the days that pre-schoolers through adults were drilled with the “buckle-up for safety” line, not that the seat belts were all that well designed in 1961 Mercury Comets.  This was also well before the days of padded dashboards, the 1961 Comet sporting a steel dashboard where, at the sudden impact of the accident, my sister did a dental impression and lost her front teeth.  Everyone in our family got to see the dental impression on the dashboard numerous times, for the Comet became our field car.  The car was totaled out, but drivable.  My dad took his acetylene torch and cut the body off the car from the front widow, doors and roof backward, leaving on only the front bumper, hood, front fenders, front seat, frame and floor pan.  He also made and installed a roll bar, just in case.  But since we didn’t wear seatbelts driving the car around the fields, I am not sure what protection the roll bar would have given us.  We drove that car around fields, down the road when we thought we could get away with it, not from the police but our parents, and in the winter pulled saucers and sleds behind it.  With the body gone and no back seat, it also served as a kind of pick-up truck, to haul buckets of dirt or other stuff around our property, including buckets full of poo goo when one year we bailed out our own septic tank.

As a devout Catholic, in spite of whatever protests, if any, Leonore or Lenore or Lenora might have had, and given stories I have heard about her I suspect she did not protest, Carl had Eric baptized in the Church.  After that, by mutual agreement between Carl and Leonore or Lenore or Lenora, Eric was permitted, in twenty-first century language, to pursue whatever religion or non-religion he chose.  Eric was the youngest of three children, a brother seven years older, and a sister, my Aunt Joyce, by all accounts the favorite Aunt of all my brothers and sisters and mine, ten years older.  Growing up, Eric served his time as an altar boy.  During several summers, his dad would ship his sister and him out of the city up north fifty miles to an uncle’s farm in a German Catholic community to work for the summer milking cows, taking care of the chickens, haying, and finding a little time to play but a lot of time to enjoy their aunt’s cookies.  The brother seven years older than Eric was too weak or lazy or whiny, more likely all three, to be any use up there except to play malicious childhood tricks on.  Well, I am not sure you can call it malicious if it is deserved.  The victim, and maybe it is not a victim if it is deserved, probably thought it malicious and undeserved.  But any impartial bystander would have sided with Eric and Joyce.  To this day that middle child is still a bit of a whiner.  Our family did not spend a lot of time with his family, who lived twenty miles from us, yet we visited my Aunt Joyce, who lived one-hundred eighty miles away, a handful of times each year and she would bring her brood to visit us a couple of times a year.  The middle child even to this day has a voice that I can’t call anything but whiny, a bit nasally and whiny, like the muted trumpet that voices the teacher in Charlie Brown television shows.  Mwroonk mwroonk mwroonk.

My mom, Mildred not Millie, was raised, with a sister and two brothers, in poverty by a widowed single mom, Clara, who cleaned houses of the better off for a living, and insisted on training her children to go to the local mission church consistently and to learn not only to read their Bible, or the Bible since there was not more than one in the house, but also to treasure what they read in the Bible.  In other words, Mildred grew up in a devout and pious Protestant home.  When Mildred was fifteen, her friend had set her up on a blind date to go roller skating at Ramona Gardens.  When Eric showed up, handsome, athletic, and, although German, looking all the part of an Italian movie star, Mildred thought he was the one set-up for her.  She introduced herself, paired up and headed off to go roller skating, leaving whoever it was she was supposed to have gotten pared with to mwroonk, mwroonk, mwroonk, or at least that is how I imagine it.  After a year of courtship, not all of it smooth, rather more like a preparation for a long life together where one has to deal with adversity, disagreements, and disputes, they decided to get married.  Two years into the marriage the first child came along, the one that was to bite the steel dashboard of the 1961 red four door Mercury Comet with fins on the back.

By the time the second or third child was born, both of whom came in rapid succession, the second one eleven months and twelve days after the first, and the third a year and eighteen days after the second, Mildred determined it her duty to begin attending a local Baptist church, Alpine Baptist Church where she and her children could be taught to be good Christian people.  The story passed along the family is that Mildred told Eric she was going and taking the kids to church, that he was welcome to come along, and that if he didn’t want to she was going anyways.  Mildred can be a bit of a take-charge sort of person, even one who has a short temper and is not going to keep her feelings bottled up, sometimes a bit blunt, which she regards as just being honest and matter-of-fact.  She has had good mental health over the years in part because of all that.  But she has also on occasion dug herself some relationship holes that required a few years and much forgiveness to fill back in.  She probably knew in the back of her mind that, given the devotion and commitment that Eric and Mildred had for each other, and their joint, deep commitment to the good of their family, he would join her, if not immediately, in going to church together.  It didn’t happen right away.  Mildred learned that the church had a softball team, and Eric was a skilled ball player.  Eric heard about the team and wanted to play, but a condition of playing was that he had to attend church.  So in part due to his devotion to Mildred and to his family, in part to his passion to play ball, Eric began to attend the Baptist church, initially more so that he could play ball.  Both the Sunday preaching and the Thursday night kindness and camaraderie of his softball team mates led Eric to make a commitment to be a daily devotee of Jesus, or as they say in the Baptist church, to ask Jesus into his heart.

Eric’s commitment to Jesus took place in the summer before my birth.  The Baptists took this as his first commitment, not one renewed from his youth and all the days his father and uncles took him to church or his catechism and confirmation or his days as an altar boy, together with Leonore or Lenore or Lenora’s Freely Methodizing him.  Whatever it was, only Eric and God know for sure.  As is, or used to be at least, the wont of Baptists, once a person makes that commitment, they are urged soon, as adult or in some other way accountable believers, to get Baptized as a sign of allegiance to the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, and as a sign of the washing away of the guilt and consequence of being born a sinner living a life opposed to God, but now, with allegiance to Jesus, or maybe better put Jesus’ allegiance to you, you are no longer a sinner living a life opposed to God.  You are still a sinner, just not living in opposition to God.  Mildred had never been baptized.  So the two of them decided that, at the church’s next baptismal service, they would both get baptized.  The next service was on a cool late October Sunday.  The water heater at the church wasn’t working, so the water in the baptismal font—for those unfamiliar with full immersion Baptists, a Baptist baptismal font is about the size of a two or four person hot tub, only deeper, with the water coming up to about rib height and nowhere near as warm—was below room temperature, not even 60 degrees.  When my dad and mom stepped down into the cool waters, with me in her ready to be born about six weeks later, she let out a gasp that was heard throughout the congregation, bringing a few snickers and requiring a brief explanation from the pastor.  Even though I was there at my first baptism, I experienced none of it.  Eric and Mildred were baptized, Eric for the second time and Mildred for the first.

My second baptism came just over eight years later in January of 1966.  We had a 1965 Chevrolet Suburban.  Back then they were not the luxury vehicles they are today.  At that time, they were mostly a pick-up truck with the rear window moved to the back tailgate, a body enclosing it all in, with some bench seats bolted to what had been the bed of the pick-up.  And ours was minimally accessorized.  No carpet or even floor mats.  No power anything except that it did have an electric starter, lights, and turn signals.  A small 283 cubic inch V-8 with a three speed shifter, the shift lever on the steering column.  It did have an AM radio, and a heater good for April through October.  With no carpet or body insulation, unless you were in the front seat you didn’t feel much heat except for being crammed with your other six siblings tightly together in the seats.  Conversely, with no insulation the mid-summer sunny hot days turned the interior into a slow-cooker.  The baptismal service when I experienced my second baptism, the first one I remember, was on a cold Sunday evening in January.  Fortunately for me the water heater was working.  I remember next to nothing about the service, what I said, how I felt, who else was there.  I think the preacher was Pastor Early, and I think his first name, which children could never utter, was Thomas.  No one called him Pastor Thomas.  It was always Pastor Early.  But I think it was Thomas since that is what I must have read on the sign out front.  Alpine Baptist Church is where I best remember standing next to my dad hearing him sing with gusto, although Baptists wouldn’t use that word since in the 1960s it was mostly associated with a Schlitz beer commercial that ran on television 1963-1967 with the line “You only go around once in life so you’ve got to grab for all the gusto you can.”  The songs I remember him seeming to love best include “In the Garden,” “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder,” “Trust and Obey,” “He Leadeth Me,” “Blessed Assurance,” “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name,” “Blessed Be the Name,” “I Will Sing the Wondrous Story,” “At the Cross,” “Nothing But the Blood,” “There is Power in the Blood,” “At Calvary,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” “Faith is the Victory,” and countless others.  While I remember nothing about my baptism, my second baptism, or the baptismal service, I remember one thing and one thing only.  When we got home that night, I forgot to get my wet clothes, wrapped up in a towel, out of the Suburban and in that cold January night my clothes froze rock solid.  I remembered them the next morning, and before the school bus came to take us to school, I went out to the Suburban, got my frozen clothes, and took them to put in the laundry tubs in the basement to thaw out so my mom could wash them.

Shoal Fish Pack Riding

If you are like the vast majority of cycling enthusiasts who live in the northern tier states, in late March you resume group rides that you haven’t done since late October.  If you have done group rides over the past five months, the groups have likely been smaller, under a dozen rather than thirty or more that you ride with the other seven months of the year.  Cyclists can maintain good levels of fitness during the five colder months, by cycling on a trainer, cycling outdoors when roads are dry, running, cross country skiing, snowshoeing, skating, spinning, and various other sorts of training.  What you don’t practice, or only rarely, in the cold months is pack riding.  When the end of March comes and you join back up with your group ride, everyone is eager to ride hard, in order to demonstrate their fitness level from winter training, or to begin to get in shape for some longer or harder summer rides.  You go from mostly going alone, to being in a pack of folks who have been going alone for five months, taking corners at speed, sprinting for village limit signs, attacking and chasing, working pace lines.  Those skills are a bit rusty.  In the first several group rides of the spring, I ride my older bike, not because of dirty roads, but because if I am going to crash because riders ahead start going down, I don’t want to damage my good bike.  Once riders have remembered and recovered sensible pack riding skills, then I ride my good bike.

Pack riding seems largely a matter of attention.  When I ride alone, I don’t have to think about other riders at my elbow when I want to avoid a road killed opossum, pothole, or crack in the pavement; I just steer around them.  I don’t have to think about the rider at my hip as I am entering or exiting a corner; I just pick my line and take the corner.  In pack riding, part of the reason my heart rate is higher is not just the harder effort; it is also partly the mental energy and adrenaline from recognizing I am in a more dangerous situation, needing the alertness to maintain my safety.  Still, it is not that complicated to ride in a fast pack.  Consider the following:

“Some fish swim together in shoals because the group provides more protection against predators, better foraging opportunities and, finally, and ideal place to find a mate.  As the shoal shimmies through the ocean, any individual can find itself in front and thus technically is the leader.  Such shoals, however, stay together not through centralized leadership but through local leadership and followership.  The movement of an individual is determined by what its immediate neighbour does (and the neighbour’s movement is determined by what its neighbour does).  Thus, the simple rule ‘do what the fish next to you does, but don’t bang into him’ can produce local leadership, in the form of a highly cohesive group moving around in a beautifully synchronized manner.  It is also clear that sticking to a simple rule like ‘do what your neighbour does’ does not require much brainpower.” (Mark van Vugt & Anjana Ahuja, Naturally Selected: The Evolutionary Science of Leadership, New York: HarperCollins, 2011, p. 44).

Adapted to pack riding, do what the riders next to you and in front of you do, but don’t bang into them.  It doesn’t require much brainpower, and that is a good thing when you want to ride at an intense level.  Your brain constitutes about a fiftieth of your body weight but consumes close to a fifth of the calories you consume, so riding with less brainpower leaves more energy to be delivered to your heart, lungs, and legs.  It does, however, require attention and alertness.  If everyone followed that rule, it might be the only rule of pack riding.  But you cannot expect everyone to follow it.  So another rule: while alert to what is happening immediately next to and in front of you, pay attention to what is happening two to six riders ahead of you, in order to anticipate what is coming your way in a split second.  Is there a sudden swerve, a sudden acceleration or deceleration?

If you have watched professional bicycle racing, especially on television, you will see overhead shots from a helicopter of a pack of up to two hundred riders spread eight to ten wide in twenty to twenty five rows riding along at twenty-five miles per hour.  The flow and change in the pack is similar to fish swimming in a shoal.  It is fluid.  Riders moving up and back.  The pack shifting left or right to avoid road hazards.  The group floating around a bend in the road or turning a corner.  There is considerable trust in those around you, in all in the pack, that they won’t do something stupid and send several riders asphalt surfing.  Crashes occur, usually when there is some reason to take great risks in order to attempt to gain great rewards.  But in your local group rides, the rewards are so small or even non-existent that there is no need to take those risks.

Next time you are in a group ride, think like a shoaling fish.

High School Classmates and FB (and I don't mean football)

Over the past six months, I have had several high school classmates contact me through Facebook to get access to my Facebook site (I know, it is easier to just say “friend me”), and I have contacted several to get access to their sites.  That jogs my memory.  Few of us look much at all like we did 35 years ago.  Do I look recognizable, I wonder?

I had no Facebook friends from high school until about a year ago when Clark Stiles got in contact with me.  He came across my name doing a Google search a few years ago when Barb VanderKolk Smoes died of cancer.  I had written a story about my history of bicycle riding in which I referred to Carol Smoes (more on that later).  The Google search turned up that story, and that is how he found me.  Carol and I have exchanged Christmas cards for 20 or 30 years.  She is an artist, a graphic designer, and makes her own beautiful and interesting cards.  I had always wondered what Clark was up to.  He and I were Chemistry and Physics lab partners; I remember him liking Pink Floyd, Monty Python, and Dr. Demento.  I thought Clark was a genius.  He certainly was one of the smartest kids from my high school class, certainly one who read more widely than probably anyone else.  Since I was not too dimwitted, I have wondered since getting out of high school what other of the smart kids ended up doing—like Carol.  To be sure there were a good number of dipshits and dimwits.  I wonder what happened to some of them.  But I was much more interested in where the smart kids went and what they did.  It turned out to be pretty disappointing.  I thought there were a large number of intellectually sharp kids in my class, and expected there to be several who became doctors, attorneys, college professors, artists, leaders of various sorts.  Don’t get me wrong.  Many have had great success in lots of other respects.  I just expected much more temporal success.

Here is one example.  Early last summer I bumped into the valedictorian or salutatorian of my high school class at my nephew’s wedding and reception in a barn in Ravenna.  It was an eighty year old dairy barn, renovated for hosting weddings and parties.  The milking area was all painted white and gutters covered with steel plate.  The upper level, where the hay had been stored, was the banquet and dance floor area.  My classmate was very smart, very studious.  She had excelled at all subjects: math, sciences, literature, social sciences, music and arts.  I think she competed in some sports: volleyball or basketball.  And she was a cheerleader.  She played the piano at the wedding, and I recognized her.  I spoke with her during the reception in the hayloft.  She went to college for a year, and dropped out to get married.  After raising two or three kids, she went back to college, finished an education degree and teaches high school math.  I had expected her to become a physician or physicist.  Was I disappointed?  She looked very happy.  It seemed that she had been a good mother, as her kids seemed to be doing well.  She’d been married to the same person for probably thirty years.  She looked healthy, even to the point of not having gained more than a dozen pounds since high school.  Which, when you think about that alone is stunning.  Today, the average American adult weighs thirty or thirty-five more pounds than the average adult weighed in 1970.  Can you say “high fructose corn syrup”?  Can you say “soda every day”?  Can you say “what the hell is ‘cooking from scratch’”?  Can you say “why walk a mile when I can get in my car and drive it”?

Another example is Clark.  I said that I had always wondered what he did.  I expected him to become something like a biochemical engineer, or a chemist working at Dow Chemical or Amway or some pharmaceutical company.  He was brilliant and creative, just what you want in a research scientist.  Shortly after he had gotten in contact with me, I was going from Minnesota where I lived to Michigan to visit my parents.  I got in contact with Clark and made arrangements to meet.  He had gone to college for a year or two or three.  But somewhere in there a close friend killed himself, but it wasn’t exactly a suicide.  Clark was crushed by the event.  He dropped out of college.  He eventually, I don’t know if it was within a year or a dozen of years, got a job working for the state social services.  I think he worked with the poor and disabled.  About a dozen years ago he took a similar job at Salvation Army, doing drug and alcohol rehabilitation.  No Ph.D. lab scientist like I expected, Jeez Louise not even a college degree.  He never finished it.  Where is he now?  Giving cups of cold water to the least of these.  I also found out a lot about Clark, and about teachers from my high school, that I didn’t know.  The house where Clark grew up, on East Randall or Arthur (same road, the name changes somewhere close to the house) just east of the railroad tracks, is a Centennial Farm.  That means it has been in the same family for over 100 years.  His grandparents were farmers there.  The house passed onto his father.  His father hated farming.  He started or took over a grocery store in Coopersville, and leased out the land to other farmers.  Clark grew up poor, but they always had enough to eat from the store.  Somewhere around junior high his dad gave up the grocery and became some sort of a traveling salesman, and did very well.  Suddenly the family had money for things other than food.  I also found out about some of the teachers.  A couple were alcoholics (including the band and the government instructors, the superintendent and vice principal), and were fine as long as they were sober.  I guess with his dad having been a grocer, and his mom active in the local Methodist Church, they knew stuff, and got to learn stuff that my family was never privy to.  We lived ten miles from the school and went to church ten miles in the opposite direction.  We never got to learn shit on anyone.  Maybe a good thing.  I had no particular reason to dislike or disrespect a teacher, except when they were pompous asses, like the one rotund English teacher who was such a dickhead and whose name fails me now, but even if I were to recall it I should keep it to myself.

I often also wonder where girls I liked in grade and high school ended up.  Late in my freshman year, I was very attracted to Carol.  In the summer I had driver’s training at the high school.  That was ten miles from my house.  Several times I had to ride my bicycle there, because my parents had only one car, and my dad needed it to go to work.  Maybe we had two by then, but my mom or one of my older sisters needed the car.  So I got around by bicycle.  Driver’s training was every morning.  If I recall correctly, on several days, but not everyday, we had driving in the afternoon, three of us with the instructor.  The cars were equipped with a brake pedal for the instructor.  I remember driving to restaurants where the instructor, some athletic coach, could get coffee, a donut, and suck down a cigarette or two to calm his nerves.  Then back on the road again, being driven around for several hours by fifteen year old, barely post-pubescent kids.  You'd think he would have had us stop at a cafe next to a bar; we'd go to the cafe for a coke and fires, while he'd slip into the bar for a mid-afternoon boilermaker.  Maybe that was on the way home after the daily sessions.  When I had the full day of driver’s training activities, I would ride my bike two miles north of school to Carol’s and spend the lunch time break with her.  Her mother and a younger brother were always there.  Her dad was the town barber.  I never met him.  Carol is a graphic artist, still very beautiful.  She graduated from high school weighing all of eighty-five pounds, maybe ninety.  I am not kidding.  And she wasn’t anorexic or bulimic. Even now she looks awfully close to a buck even in weight at the most.  She got a BFA, her husband is a successful architect.

I have kept in contact with my junior year girlfriend, Jayne Fettig.  She went to college, got a degree in English, I believe.  She got married just out of college, and raised a litter, five kids I think, and several of them are spitting images of her face.  Her husband owns a gravel pit, hauling, and snow removal company.  She has worked alongside him for about thirty years now, driving truck or operating the front end loader.  She was always tough.  I was to her house, about fifteen or twenty years ago, and saw all those kids that looked like her.  No doubt who they belonged to.

For a brief period about twenty-five or thirty years ago, I had gotten in contact with a girlfriend I had from midway through my sophomore year, after I got my driver’s license, until into my junior year.  Her name was Sherry Terry.  She went to another school, and I met her at church youth group.  I liked her.  She was attractive.  I must say I never had any unattractive girlfriends.  I was shallow.  You had to at least be good looking if I was going to be interested in you as a girlfriend.  Sherry was very cute, pretty in fact.  And she was smart.  I guess that criterion raises me a step just above abject shallowness.  All my girlfriends were smart.  If you couldn’t do geometry, algebra, chemistry and physics, and weren’t interested in reading good literature, you could go to Burger King and listen to the Bee Gees or America or Captain and Tennile or Olivia Newton John or Eagles with someone else.  Like I said, I liked her, but was unsure that she liked me.  I found out after a youth group meeting when I asked her if she wanted a ride home instead of calling her parents to come pick her up.  She lived about four miles from church.  She said yes.  I was pretending to be a gentleman, and opened the passenger side door of my 1967 Pontiac Tempest Custom, two-door medium blue, with a 326 cubic inch V-8 and a two speed transmission.  She got in.  And slid over to the middle of the front seat!  So when I got around the back of the car and entered the driver’s seat, she was up next to me!  Gosh she was sweet.  I bet she was that sweet for her next boyfriend, and for the man who eventually became her husband.  I am not sure what happened to her after high school.  I think she went to Lake Superior State College (now University), but don’t know if she graduated.  I know she got married, becoming Sherry Quackenbush.  I don’t know if that was a better name change.  I heard from one of my sisters about five years ago that she bumped into her in a chiropractor’s office.  Over the past several years when I would visit my parents, I would go for a bicycle ride for twenty to seventy miles, and plan the route to take me past the house where she lived on Indian Lakes Road by the Rogue River Golf Course.  Back in high school, I lived about fourteen miles from Sherry’s.  My parents have moved, and now live less than ten miles from where she used to live.  On one of those rides, one closer to seventy miles, I also rode past the house where Carol grew up.  And another time I rode my bicycle past Jayne’s childhood home.

I wonder also about a lot of the guys that were my friends and acquaintances from high school.  I think, however, I am more interested in how my former girlfriends are doing.  I don’t think that is creepy.  I think it is because I genuinely liked them.  Indeed, I think I genuinely loved them.  I think I continued to love them enough to hope and want the best for them.  I wanted to know that they were doing well.  Yes, as a teenager, I think I could be in love, I could love people.  In fact, I broke up with one of my high school girlfriends (and maybe the only one I broke up with, the rest dumped me, always resulting in a heart break for me) because I thought I wasn’t good enough for her, that she deserved someone better than me.  Really, I am not kidding.  She was beautiful and smart, so that wasn’t it.  She had a good heart, a very good heart.  She probably had one of the finest characters of any in our graduating class.  I felt like I would corrupt her, detract from the good soul she was.  Not to this day  have I told her that I broke up with her because I felt I was not going to be good for her.  I remember the experience because when I told her I wasn’t going to be her boyfriend anymore, she was devastated as only a fifteen year old girl can be when she feels rejected by a boy she likes.  She sobbed, and I remember to this day her saying to me in a nasally crying voice, “you hate me, you don’t love me anymore.”  I said “I don’t hate you,” but I didn’t try to explain it any further.  I was heart-broke that I broke her heart.  Maybe it is too pompous or phony chivalry, paternalistic before I was even a pater; I felt I owed it to her to get her away from me.  She felt emotionally hurt, and I felt lousy for hurting her.

About a month ago I got out my high school yearbook and looked through the photos of my classmates.  Several I couldn’t remember a thing about.  Several I could, some of those things not very flattering.  Things like, “I remember he smelled bad.”  “I remember he was really stupid.”  “I remember she was what we considered fat, but nowadays would be just barely bigger than the average sized high school girl.”  “I remember he had bad acne.”  For all I know, I may be the only one who got a Ph.D., and the only one to be a college professor.  Surely it is odd to have a graduate of a farming community high school become a philosopher.  I wonder when they look at my photo what they remember about me.  I probably don’t want to know.  Or I hope that what they remember is much worse than what I am now.  Strangely, I hope their memories are not very flattering of me.  And I hope that were they to meet me now and spend an hour or two with me sucking down some ale, they would be surprised in a good way.  One would hope that thirty-five years would bring some improvement.