I Like to Ride My Bicycle

A scene from last week: Hurtling down Ninth Avenue clutching onto my battered folding bike for dear life, I was forced to trail behind a NYC sanitation truck by the cars zooming around me. A black thought crossed my mind – it already had been one of those mornings when everything was ten times harder than it should have been (like my bike chain popped off twice!) – what if the truck stopped short or I hit a bad bump and ended up unconscious in the back of the hopper, and was unknowingly compacted at their next pick-up (only to be found at the end of their run)? Would that make a great CSI episode or what?

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I bought this bike right after 9/11 to commute to work, as I was convinced that the subways soon would be crawling with suicide bombers (visions of bombed-out buses in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem burned in my head). Now I ride to my job for exercise, and take the trains when it rains. If all else fails, I walk.