the pedaler
by bam
whenever i hop on my old blue bike, i hear the “wizard of oz” bicycle theme in my head. you know, the one with the pedaling witch. the one that goes like this: da-da-da-da-da-daaaah-da. you probably knew what i meant before i spelled it out. and now, oops, sorry, you’ll be singing it all day. one of those mind gnats that won’t go away.
the reason i bring up my old bike, and even better, my old wicker basket, is because it’s the old lady i always wanted to be. the carefree one, the one with time to pedal through the village, collecting her wares. the bread from her breadman, the milk from the farmer at the end of the lane, the tomatoes from the vine in the patch that is mine.
i would, in my blurry-edged vision, stop to chat with a passerby. ferry tomatoes to a neighbor who’s ailing. wear my wide-brimmed hat, the one with the ribbon that ripples as it blows in the breeze back behind me.
i would cast lupine seeds as i pedaled.
erk! screech on the brakes.
i am, you see, getting carried away, pretending i live in a picture book, tucked in the pages where drawings are pretty, where colors come dabbed on the end of a brush. i do that sometimes, get carried away.
and that, here, is the point: my bike and my sweet little basket are follies. they stand for the way i wish life would be. a life that didn’t demand scrounging for keys, racing out doors, bottom-dropping into the front seat, screeching away from the curb, dashing to get somewhere, something, someone before i was late, caught without milk for the children, reported to the department of children and family services for leaving my little one at school overnight.
at least the last of those has not ever happened. i’ve been late plenty. pretended it was breakfast-for-dinner night, made do with orange juice. but not yet, like a friend of mine, did i forget, ‘til the school called her, to pick up a child.
dear lord, what is this gerbil wheel we scamper on? and why is it we run as if the big steam iron in the sky was chasing behind us, ready to press against flesh if we did not get all done on time, if we slacked a wee little?
or maybe it’s just me. maybe i’m the only one cranked up like a cuckoo clock. but, psst, here’s a secret: i’ve been watching, and i dare not think i’m alone. here’s another secret: it’s nuts out there.
domestic tranquility is what happens in the middle of the night when, for once, all bodies are accounted for, and deeply asleep.
the minute one eyeball is opened on but one of those bodies, the chance of teetering into the chaos that is the norm in these times, is, well, you might want to bet your allowance on it.
it seems we are, many of us, overstuffing the sausage that is our fat little roly-poly lives. and so, the old car at the curb, the one that might as well sleep with the motor on, so we could shave seconds from errands that don’t quite fit in the puzzle, that are too far, really, that are too many, for certain, that old car, maybe might be the curse, but it might hold the cure.
what if we lived lives reined in by the pedals on our old under-used bikes? what if we pedaled as far as the village, and not so much farther? what if we filled our old baskets, carried home what we could? what if we were powered by thigh muscles and not fuel sucked from the earth?
what if our wide-brimmed hat, not our keys, hung by the door? what if we stopped to talk to the folks on the sidewalk?
oh, goodness gracious, i know it’s naive. i know it is silly. but all that i’m saying is we’ve got to do something. seems a bike and a basket might make for a swell place to start.
might as well make like the witch on the wizard of oz. put our toes to the pedal. push with all of our might.
give it a whirl.
you know the words: da-da-da-da-da-daaaah-da.
okey doke, folks. your turn. one: do you ever think your life’s out of hand? your days too packed? your errands too many? two: do you have some little folly, some something you keep close at hand just to remind you to slow down, to simplify, to savor the gift of each blessed hour?
pull up a chair 
not silly or naive at all, dear bam. i live like that, going slowly slowly here and there. or not going anywhere at all some days. a wise someone once said “saying no to one thing means saying yes to something else” (or so much more). so simple, so smart. i guess saying no is my “little folly”, as you call it. took years to learn it, but man, does it work like magic!
Ahhhh, a ‘picture book’ life sounds divine to me. My days are jam-packed with stuff that sop up every last drop of time and energy. Thanks for the reminder to s–l–o–w down.
Heck. You struck another power chord. A few things I do to swim against the current. Play the blues. Uh huh. It’s always new and different, and a great way to “poke fun at your troubles”. For me, piano blues…Or reach out to someone just to encourage them. Make waves. Or lie down on the sofa and read, fall asleep, read until your next appointment. Grab the reins. No one really grasps how much can be packed in to a day anyway– too many variables. So create pockets. Do it. Take a rabbit trail. Do physical comedy–laughter breaks the tedium. It’s when you break away, even in the smallest measure, like mispronouncing a word for effect, you feel the cool breeze of freedom. It all comes down to choice. Ay, there’s the power, we can choose, thank Heaven! Like Solzhenitsyn or Mandela.
Doggoned brilliant post, read the morning after my second stumble-home-from-work after 9 pm in a row, too beat to do the tasks I’d hoped to handle before a treasured repeat houseguest shows up at my door tomorrow night. Heck, one line on my to-do list is finding a shop (the one in my ‘hood closed suddenly, replaced by a place that sells blingy, spinning chrome hubcaps) so I can take my bike to a mechanic for a much-needed overhaul. It’s locked, sagging against a wooden pallet out back, springs rusty, tires deflated, the tarp that used to shield it from the elements frayed beyond use by the neighborhood cats. For more than a year I couldn’t even find the key to the Kryptonite lock so I could take it out for a spin. And I didn’t think I had the time for that spin anyway. Thanks, BAM, for dangling out there the hope that I and others CAN make the time.
Folks, sosser is right. It’s all about saying no. To so many things! Mainly, our immediate imagining of how things should look or be–saying no to that, to replace it with saying yes to how we truly desire things to be. Maybe it is closer to the picture book world bam portrays so alluringly (I love that Miss Rumphius too….!). All that running around is a serious hamster wheel, just like you say bam. Why do we do it? What’s it about? Are we scampering toward a something–a goal, a destination? Or away from a something–perhaps all that blankness that feels alarmingly like our own potential meaninglessness in the cosmos? The crazy thing is that in all our scampering we’re dragging our children onto the wheel and yanking them out of their childishness, their childhood, imposing upon them all the stress, consumerism, ambition, and hamsterism that is our adulthood in these times. Do they deserve this? How will we account for this?As for my bike, in a moment of foolish and utterly misplaced compassion I loaned it to an unreliable someone who never returned it, offering only the vaguest, oddest reasons (was it stolen? was it busted to bits? did he sell it? I’ll never know…). So all summer I have been without a bike. How dreary. And yes, I dash around in my car overmuch because yes, I am usually in a hurry. A bike is really, truly, a symbol of separating from the hamster wheel. You travel ever so much more slowly, but you hear and see so much more. But of course, bam, if I only traveled by bike I could really never visit you at all. Cars do have their place….but bikes should have a bigger role than we generally give them, most definitely.
one quick thought from the Kentucky farmer poet, Wendell Berry, from his poem the “Mad Farmer’s Manifesto”a bit of a paraphrase because I don’t have the poem in front of me…. but the last lines go something like thisdo something each day that doesn’t computemake lots of tracks like the fox,,,,,,,practice resurrection