Friday, June 24, 2016

Conjugal

With a perspective informed by almost three decades of connubial bliss, I’m well aware that married people tend to grow alike over the years; what I didn’t realize until last night is that couples who are merely betrothed may also develop similar proclivities.

Case in point: the usually mild-mannered bride-to-be channeling her inner fiancĂ© with a somewhat impatient driver who took umbrage to all those bikes in the way out of downtown.  While it was calmly shouted through the driver’s side window that the piece of road in question was actually a “Bus Only,” lane, tempers flared and an impromptu teaching moment ensued complete with empty threats and handclaps for effect.  Had the groom himself been there to bear witness, I’m quite sure a tear or two of pride would have glistened in his loving eyes.

Now, while that metaphorical storm blew over without incident, the same can’t be said for the literal squall that rose up soon after.  One expects a summer downpour to be brief, but surprise!  Every time you thought it was ending, another wave of water arrived.

We did learn, however, that a trellis is not a shelter, although it does sort of feel drier when there’s wood overhead.  Also: a sidewalk qualifies as higher ground when a parking lot is flooded, but once your socks are soaked, you may as well ride through the river anyway.

The evening’s returning Nurse of Honor opted for the firepit he’d never seen rather than the covered park shelter but given the fire-making skills of resident hardcore boy scouts, it all worked out fine: eventually, the flames were hot enough to evaporate the deluge if you stood close and the nearby foliage dense enough to intercept most of the downpour; the challenge was choosing between the two.

“I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain,” sang Seventies folk-rocker and sometimes-crazy person, James Taylor; same as last night’s ride, the wet and the hot wedded and becoming as one.

Friday, June 17, 2016

Longest

At first, it’s just a tiny campfire, barely staying lit against the night breeze; but soon, enough fuel has been added and sufficient accelerant applied, that people’s eyebrows are being singed and any sprinkles of rain descending evaporate before they can even hit ground.

And this goes not only metaphorically for Point83 as a temporal phenomenon, but also, literally, for the little beach fire that Lieutenant Dan coaxed, eventually with the help of many a driftwood log dragger, into a conflagration that somehow managed not to attract the attention of the local authorities (at least during my tenure) but also, more pertinently, succeeded in lighting up a night that would be the shortest for any Thursday this year.

How appropriate, therefore, that the ride itself was likely the longest of 2016, and did, I believe, add a new southwest corner to the club’s bounding box.

A giant bottle of tequila provided much of the inspiration for the southward trek and magically disappeared back into the pack just at the moment when Burien’s finest cruised by our roadside re-group, one of several that did a remarkable job of keeping together what a smiling youngster counted as 56 bikes in a line of which, at that moment, I brought up the rear.

But it was also probably the wealth of lumens we all get to ingest this time of year in Seattle, when a single five-hour energy shot is all it takes to get you through the set and rise of nautical twilight.  It’s no wonder folks are so willing to be intrepid; night’s not so scary when it only dark for a handful of hours.

Of course, being able to catch the light rail for much of the way home doesn’t hurt, either, but that’s legit when you have to navigate the road under the airport runway to locate the station.

Those jets passing directly overhead are impressive on take-off; but it takes a bike to really fly.

Friday, June 10, 2016

Re-Remembering

As Buffy the Vampire Slayer made so abundantly clear, high school is hell, so it’s weird in a way that any of us should remember those four long years of our lives with any kind of affection; and yet, somehow, many of us do.

The tedious hours spent slogging through Trigonometry class or the many moments of sheer terror as yet another young hoodlum cornered you outside in the smoking area are forgotten and only the good stuff remains, like reading Mao Tse-Tung in Political Philosophy class or making out with your new crush in the back seat of the bus on the way home from a Friday night Ski Club ski trip.

And, of course, the same goes for Prom, which, with each passing year, grows slightly more golden in memory, so that, after a decade or two (or in my case, four), the event assumes a place in our consciousness reserved for the most pleasant of remembrances: our first sexual encounter, first skinny dip, first blackout drunk—(all of which, coincidentally, may have happened at Prom.)

Fortunately, this process of revisionist personal history is accelerated by events that color the past with a much-improved present. 

So, for instance, instead of being stuck with the recollection of driving your family’s Ford Maverick to the Central Catholic High School gym, you can substitute the memory of sixty spiffily-dressed cyclists pedaling crosstown under pink and blue skies to a lakeside shelter where much gabbing, shimmying, and quaffing takes place.  You get to paint over awkward fumblings to Doobie Brothers’ songs with an entire concrete dance floor getting low to Lil’ Jon.  And painful reminiscences of conversations about home room and summer jobs are subsumed by mental pictures of circling the Jenga fire and engaging in discourse on aesthetics, technology, and the meaning of life, (as well as where to find another beer.)

And happily, all is well that ended well—at least that’s how I’ll remember it now.