Angelic

photo by Joeball

If you’re going to crash on your bike and get knocked out for an hour and break your collarbone, probably a rib, maybe a cheekbone, and suffer various and sundry other ailments, including, apparently, an instantaneous, albeit painful, treatment of free orthodontia, as did our beloved fancy colleague and well-known Peter White Cycles critic, Mr. Fred Blasdel, it’s kind of a drag that it should happen on your way to work, at 9:30 in the morning on a Tuesday, while perfectly sober; it seems a waste of all those times when a person is pedaling about well after midnight with a consciousness deranged in one manner or another and somehow manages to make it home perfectly intact. 

I guess that just goes to show that our guardian angels get lazy or inattentive when they figure they need not be so vigilant; and perhaps it’s an argument for more regular applications of wake n’ bake or morning 40 just to keep them on their toes.

In any event, once folks at Westlake were informed of Fred’s mishap, conjecture about ride routes evaporated as it became obvious that the obvious course of action was to pay him a little visit en masse, and even though the sweet little card many of us signed somehow got lost in the four blocks between the Red Apple and his house, it somehow seem strangely appropriate that the empty envelope did happen to make it.

We hugged him gently and hung around long enough to ascertain that although a good deal worse for wear, he’s still our Fred and, not wanting to overstay one’s welcome with an invalid, took the short jaunt over to the industrial views westward accorded by the only park we ever tend to visit on Beacon Hill.

Beers were drunk, stories of other bicycle mishaps were shared, and a souvenir-bat-sized joint was smoked.

As far as I know, everyone made it home okay; guardian angels on the job, vigilant!