All In

G started 1st grade a week ago. He's no stranger to school as he went through the pre-K farm league before a year in the minors of full day Kindergarten. As you can see by the look on his face, he's all in.

I've waited all summer for this! He said, trying to keep from exploding.

His buddies are all back too so the whole line-up will share in faster, longer, stronger hijinks. They're a tight crew of boys that I hope can play hard and challenge each other all through school. Sometimes they let the girls play their hybrid Parcour-Power Ranger-Ninja games too.

I'm really pleased with his excitement for school. I know it will ebb and flow but a strong start is a good beginning. Even if his favorite part of the day is a tie between recess and lunch.

Fifteen years ago, barely two years after getting married, A and I concluded the one class a term, 16-year college plan wasn't going to work. She had graduated a few months before our wedding, but I had put off college and even had some high-school to finish. I had every intention of going to college, I just all of a sudden was 29.

I was reminded that there were perfectly good skilled labor careers that didn't require a degree. To be honest, I felt like I needed to conquer college if only to prove to myself that my high school experience was a fluke.  I was one of those kids who was too smart to be left alone, but had too much energy for anyone else to keep up. I simply fell through the cracks of the bureaucracy of education.

 A and I brained stormed and mapped out career possibilities that could come from being a Warehouse Shipping/Receiving Lead. It was a pretty short list. Finally, as the decision came to either commit full heartedly to my education, or take a job as a LTL delivery driver, we decided to swing for the fences. We went all in and I quit my job at the end of August.

Like many newly minted college graduates, when we got married, A had chosen the high road, the career where money or benefits were slim but the chance to change the world was the pitch she swung at. In truth it was a crappy job that leaned more towards long hours and abuse than any chance to hit a home run.

In the spring of 1999 she found a slightly better job as an Administrative Assistant. Barely 3 months before I quit my job of 4 years.  By October I landed a part time job at a coffee shop  in the evenings and started riding my bike again for the 30 mile round trip commute to school and work each day. I treated school like a job. I scheduled myself to stay on campus, splitting my time between classes and studying in the library for 7 hours each day.

There were days or weeks of course when school wasn't my favorite. Much was at stake besides just getting good grades. I had to assure my new in-laws that I wasn't just avoiding work or using their daughter as an ATM machine. A recognized how serious I was taking school. She in turn took her job seriously. We had plenty of heated discussions, but we made up every time and resolved to win the game we were playing one pitch, one inning at a time.

Our friends and family supported us as best they could, trying to motivate us to keep on sticking it out and reminding us that once we made it through our college experience our lives would get better.

How could it not? We were slumming in the minor leagues while many of our peers were working their way into middle management, I often thought.

In the end, it took six years. An entire years worth of credits in failed math classes alone. But that is worth a story all its own. A switched jobs a third time, taking with her a growing confidence of her abilities and stepped up to the bigs. She was a major league sugga' momma by the time I was in my cap and gown.

My point is, for those six years, I carried the same motivation and the same energy for accomplishing an educational goal that I see on G's face in that picture. The difference is that I had some life experience, some successes, failures, lean and lonely times and a strong, loving wife to lean on.  He doesn't even know what's coming. Our job now is to help him keep his energy, keep his imagination, but help him confront his challenges head on and succeed.  Before he turns 30. If only so we can finally get this school thing behind us and head south to watch spring training and enjoy a retirement!

30 years ago: Fixed Gear Day Care

 

 

 

The Hellyer Park Velodrome was a dream come true for my mom. Who would have thought a concrete circle with a chain link fence around it would keep her 13 year old son busy for hours at a time?

A year after realizing I could ride my bike way too far from home for my juvenile navigational skills, and a few too many collect calls at dusk from well outside of town, my mom drove me just a few miles away to the only velodrome in Northern California to meet an old man named Ed Steffani.

Ed was retired and the grounds keeper of the track. According to on-line sources today, he was an architect and the designer of the track as well. I'm not sure I knew that way back then. Regardless, 30 years ago, what Ed talked about almost endlessly was the glory days of competing in the 6-Day races on tracks all around the country, especially at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

I would circle around the track on my Univega Gran Tourismo touring bike that was far too big for me, watching him move sprinklers around the in-field grass. I'd practice diving down the banking into the sprinters lane and pretend to accelerate my slow, heavy bike. He'd call me down to take a break and tell me a story then send me back up onto the track to continue to ride around. Throughout the summer I brought friends for competition and Ed would make up races for us to do. Like any good, old-timer, he'd usually include an "unknown distance race" that took the better part of an hour. Most of my friends thought the track was boring and the old man too kookie. But a few of us stuck it out for the summer and for even longer.

I confiscated my older brothers' 10-speed, again too big for me, stripped it down and made it into a single fixed gear bike until I had enough paper-route money to buy an old track bike that Ed dug up for me. I still have it today. It has pencil thin seat and chain stays and ornate lugs. There's even a brass oil cap on the bottom bracket, something I've seen on few other bikes. It was navy blue and faded to a really nice patina. I went ahead and rattle canned it black a few years later. Someday I'll strip it down and have it repainted.

By the middle of that 1984 summer, the all afternoon sessions weren't enough. I was able to race the Monday night training race series. With the women. Not a lot of 13-year olds were showing up to race it turned out and the ladies didn't give much thought to the developing male ego they were crushing. Somewhere I have video a family friend took of me leading one lap and getting lapped 3 laps later. By girls. The summer passed and by August, fully emasculated, I moved up to racing with the category 4 beginner men. My results were the same but I chalked up getting lapped by men as a personal victory.

Regardless of the beatings I'd taken during the Monday evening races, I continued to show up during the week to ride endless laps while Ed drug the hose around the infield, swept the Eucalyptus leaves from turns 3 and 4 or painted the bleachers.  And he always had a story to tell me when I stopped for a drink of water.

Five Years: Better Than I Can Imagine

Long before I knew any better, I imagined life after a successful cycling career similar to that of say, Sean Kelly or Eddy Plankaert.  My last race bike, I dreamed, would eventually be altered with upright handlebars and a rack and child seat jerry-rigged to the stays for my kid to nod off in as I soft-pedaled around town reminiscing victories over cobblestones and mountain tops.

I have fond memories of myself as a pip-squeak on the back of my mom's green Huffy 3-speed. It had a black, metal framed child seat on the back. The vinyl cushion for the seat was red and black plaid. My thighs and back peeled off it, soaked in sweat, when we arrived at destinations. The bike creaked and moaned as she pedaled. The clunky shifting, marginally effective brakes on steel rims, and the whirl of the freewheel between bursts of her turning the pedals made the frame flex so much that the cranks scraped the chain guard. Riding on the back of her bike was a rhythmic song that often lulled me to sleep. I nodded off as dead weight, that nearly crashed us, numerous times.

Dreams and reality mix for a bitter cocktail. My last race bike as it turned out, the one I brought home from Belgium as pay-back for a harsh reality, was a Bianchi in celeste green and black.  Two years later I pulled it out of a travel case and started to occasionally show up to Saturday club rides. It was then I realized the beautifully hand crafted bike on which I'd suffered and starved was cracked in three of the lugs and was, effectively, a ghost of a past life. No child would ever ride precariously on the back of it. There would be no absorbing the passion and legacy of their father through osmosis.

Twelve more years rolled by and finally, as A managed through the last three months of pregnancy, I spent my days recovering from a broken hip and elbow, an odd combination of injuries that cursed me to a wheelchair until the week before our son was born.  I spent a large part of my recovery time scrolling the internet.   Of all my internet discoveries, the bakfiets cargo bike was my newfound mechanism of escape.

Over the course of the following year, while A began navigating a hellish recovery from child birth and continued to be in and out of the hospital, I kept myself sane by imagining what sort of adventures G and I would have on our Bullitt cargobike. It would be the first bike I purchased new since I was 14 (which also happened to be the same year I took wood shop in 8th grade).  I was excited about the cargobike.  But the cargo box for $400 extra did nothing for me.  What kid wants to sit in a box? I thought to myself. Kids turn boxes into spaceships! I knew I could do better.

My mobility returned and I took G for walks in his stroller that doubled as a walker for me. I tested his interest in bike riding with trips through the neighborhood in a milk crate on the front of the Schwinn I inherited from A's grandfather. During his naps I deconstructed the wheelchair ramp that my dad built in our garage. By Memorial Day I had a plan.  I decided to start building a boat to go on the front of our newly purchased Bullitt.

 Like all good projects, I have since learned, what I thought would take a holiday weekend plus seven days turned into ten weeks. At the time, I owned a drill, a circular saw, a hand saw and a beer fridge. The most recent project I'd completed was ten years prior, right After A and I got married. I made a head board and two bedside tables. Not since 8th grade though had I made anything that actually functioned. Neither bedside table was square or level. Had it not been for the fact that we couldn't afford to buy furniture, I would have burned them in the fireplace. So my boat project started innocently enough by ripping 2x4's into 5/8th strips and cutting half-inch plywood into ribs that looked sort of like what I had read on the internet about boat building.

I had roughly two-hours a day to work during nap time or after G went to bed. That included time to clean up and put tools away. Sometimes that even happened. For the most part, I was frantically working against the clock in a pile of sawdust and vague idea of what I was doing.  I wanted this project done by G's first birthday.

Building a boat to fit on a bike is not the same as building a boat to float on water. On the one hand, the boat I was building did not need to float. On the other hand, making room in a boat for a front wheel (for example) posed a design issue. Regardless, I fought on. I cut long pieces of wood into smaller ones. Small pieces into scrap and cursed quietly as I cut scrap wood into dust. Occasionally, I cut a piece that would fit into what ended up being perhaps the heaviest boat-shaped pile of wood ever. Everything about the project was a challenge. Even the paint refused to dry. Yet, by G's first birthday, the boat-bike was ready to ride. Or set sail. Or both.

To begin with, we started with small rides through the neighborhood building strength back into my leg.  We stepped it up to the route along the riverfront path and looped around downtown before heading back toward Mt. Tabor.  I was surprised by the attention the boat-bike received. People drove dangerously close, swerving at us while attempting to take a picture and tell us what a great bike we had. My favorite though, was a guy in a pickup truck yelling, "That's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever seen!"

G took well to riding. We explored park after park and found ourselves far from home, out of diapers, teething crackers or snacks more than once. I learned that he especially enjoyed riding next to the MAX tracks as the light rail trains rolled by. Most evenings, and nearly every weekend, we spent exploring his new world, sometimes a few blocks from home and other times miles and miles away. He learned to count and recite the alphabet on our rides. A was able to get much needed rest after multiple surgeries while G and I were boat-biking. I was able to ponder and appreciate the fact that real life is never what we dream it will be but so much richer than what one can imagine.  In hindsight, now five years later, the 50 pound boat I made out of a wheelchair ramp, led to the most fun and cherished bicycle adventures I've ever had.