Resource List: The Bicycle's Point of View

Resource List: 

Video - the Risks of Riding Right

Cycling Fallacies

Just another day

The playground is for families of color; the pea patch is for childless white women.  It's not an official rule, not posted anywhere, it's the reality called "social segregation", and I think of it every time we go to the low income playground and pea patch.

I think of it today, as I have tottered out holding my three year old's hand for balance.  I am still in recovery from the food poisoning that has had me on my back for two days and kept him trapped in our apartment.

The other children from two or three families are fresh from some profoundly special occasion; they are in satin and chiffon, embroidery and sequins.  I managed to get my son in a bath this morning, but the co-ordination it takes to untangle his long hair is days away.  He shuffles past in football-shaped slippers he picked out when I told him he had to choose footwear that he could put on himself because I did not have the balance to bend.  His ragged clumped hair looks exactly like that of the classmate I had in first grade, who used to grin and shrug as our teacher would publicly rail at her for her unkempt state.  I am sharply, painfully aware of how my neighbors-- multi-generational poor blacks, immigrants, outright refugees-- do not think of allowing their children to step outside in less than immaculate condition, lest they be judged.   I am more embarrassed than I can say.

My son watches wide-eyed as an older girl turns flips on the rings, her hijab magically falling into perfect position as she comes upright each time.  My son clambers on to the teeter-totter with her younger sister; she plays with him until she realizes he is a "him".  The girls swarm around to stare in my son's face; he has a girl's skin, a girl's eyebrows, they tell me, seeking to rationalize the irrational cultural lens in which they have interpreted all he does as feminine.  They scatter and fly to process their experience, and my boy is left alone on the teeter-totter.  "Why did it stop working?" he wonders out loud.  Like so much of life, it takes someone to do it with you.

The baby of the bunch has stumbled trying to follow her sisters up the slide.  She wails.  They run to her and their faces turn to me.  Suddenly I am not the stranger, I am merely the nearest mother.  "She's bleeding, do you have a tissue?"
"I have a skirt," I say simply, and drop to my knees in their midst.  The baby stares at me uncertainly but does not move away as I wipe her chin with the hem of the red-brown dress that has hidden stains for ten years now.  A barely-split lip, I think, the bleeding has already stopped.  "Smile for us," I ask her, to check the damage, and she shows a thin slice of teeth and toddles off to play more, content that she was hurt and a grown-up came to fix things.

That's what grown-ups are for.

Short Stories with a Long Reach

This is a list of links to stories that I read while growing up, some of them only once, that have stayed with me all my life.

The Cat and the Coffee Drinkers by Max Steele

Johnny Lingo's Eight Cow Wife by Patricia McGerr

The Revolt of Mother by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

Wheelbarrow by Eddy Orcutt

My belly hangs like a ripe fig now.

My belly hangs like a ripe fig now, the same distended belly I have seen in other mothers, mother women at my synagogue, mother cats long after the litter is gone, mother dogs with their dugs almost dragging.  I finally have official permission to exercise after a long string of tests for my pains, and I plan out planking and crunches, pluck hairs for the first time, and wonder if starting to wear make-up at my right age might improve my credibility as a speaker and advocate... and at the same time wonder what it would be to love this fig-body the way I love figs, why I would ever want to erase the evidence of my maternity.

This is, after all, what I was born to do-- not all that I was born to do, but a proud and primal part.  There are generations on generations of mammalian mother love written in the figgy flop of my body.

I am stronger again, on this wild see-saw.  This winter I lost my breath, and with it, my ability to carry a child who loved the world from my arms.  The steroids forced us to finish weaning. I have come to realize that profoundly changed our relationship because the nightly nursing was the only time my son could count on me to stop doing and simply be with him.  Now months later I am strong enough and stable enough for him to ask to be carried just to be closer to me.  How long before the curve of my strength and the curve of his weight cross lines and part us again?  Up and down, closer and farther, growing up and growing old all the time.

I love figs.

I love figs.  I love them like the smell of a newborn baby.  I love their gravid weight, I love the way they become unabashedly vulnerable in their moment of ripeness.  I love the way figs open up to reveal a world of alien sweet tendrils, I love the wonderful shapelessness of their crushability, the way my little son, wide eyed, can pull the open purpley wonder of a fig into the impossible smallness of his mouth with the fluid possibility of a sea creature vanishing into a cave.

I love that my mother asked my father to plant a fig tree, as he recovered from the heart attack, so that every year the tree grew bigger and stronger she could see in it the life they had that they could so easily have missed.  I love that this tropical tree growing way up in the northwest in the fourth corner of the country where it has no business produces enormous, succulent figs.  I love that I never knew my mother loved figs, and loved the same figs I love best, the new leaf green figs as purple inside as a flower, until she asked for the tree.  I love that my son has been watching us devour figs all week and has refused to have anything so suspiciously green enter his mouth until the last hour of the last day of this visit, when he asked for one last walk outside and then devoured one, two, three side by side with me.  I love that there are figs that were unripe this morning, unripe at midday, unripe when my father made his rounds and when the neighbors came to pick, that are ripe now in the last hour after sunset for my small son to discover again what he learned last year, and the year before that-- figs are good.