It rained yesterday. It was a cold rain that met the skin
with a bite, a tiny sting with each drop. The sky was dark. The day was nearly
spent. I slipped on my rain gear, pulled my bike off the rack, and it felt
wrong. Loose somehow. I clipped my saddle bag to the rack and watched it sway
like a broken tree limb in the wind.
There is a bracket that allows me to connect my rack to my
bike. The bracket was broken on the drive side, sheared through. The rack, in
turn, had sliced through the housing of my shifter cable, pealed back the
plastic skin and revealed the twisted cable beneath. It felt like I was looking
at muscle beneath torn skin, at something I ought not to see.
I bound the rack to the frame as best I could like a field
medic splinting a fractured arm. The rack still swayed, but less so. The ride
home was strange. The rain splashed my face. The puddles split into twin waves
my wheels cut through them. The bike felt wrong beneath me. It pulled when I
stood, resisted my command to accelerate or turn. But it carried me on, like a
wounded animal just trying to get home.
You can watch a bead of water form on your front tire on
days like that. At slow enough speeds, surface tension holds the water to the
tire as it rotates. Speed up just a little, and the surface breaks. The water
sprays from the front of the tire like a circular waterfall.
The ride, that wet slog on my wounded bike, set the tone for
the evening. Everyone, everything, was raw and wounded and off kilter. There
are days like that. Days when it feels like the world is bleeding, like the
world is mourning some great loss. I suppose every day is like that, depending
on where you are.
I am home from work today. Sick. Achy. Tired. Mournful.
Maybe a little melodramatic. And it has me thinking about sadness and happiness
and whether the two are mutually exclusive. Because in the midst of that ride,
that slog, that trek home, I smiled a little at the rain. I smiled the way that
a man smiles when he knows that the expression on his face has no bearing on
the situation at hand.
There is this illusion that we have a lot of control over
our lives. We have some. But there are limits to our control. I could not make
the rain stop. I could not heal my bike. The only choice I had in the moment
was whether to laugh or cry. To smile or mourn. And I suppose I chose both.
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