By Al Drinkle
It was late at night and I was almost home, riding my bicycle through the quiet streets of an adjacent neighbourhood. I entered the dead end of a cul-de-sac through a pedestrian path, pedalling along a short street that remained at stark odds with the relative gentrification around it. Its run-down apartment buildings and houses did little to belie the disproportionate occupancy by miscreants, drunks, hard drug users and general down-and-outers.
A few ramshackle upper-level porches of various apartments displayed suspicious quantities of bicycle frames and wheels, and a small house on the corner seemed to shelter an outlandish number of tenants — any of whom could be spotted on the front stoop at all hours, fingers interminably searching through the contents of grimy satchels or lips desperately wrapped around glass pipes.
As I rolled down the street, balancing sympathy with caution, a battered van brazenly transitioned from the busy thoroughfare that I had just left onto the street in question by scaling a concrete curb, a patch of grass and a sidewalk that to law-abiding drivers marks the end of the cul-de-sac. As it caught up to me the driver rolled down the passenger window.
“Just out stealing bikes, eh?” he wheezed. “You better watch your back, I've got my eye on you.”
“What?!?” was all I had time to shout as plumes of exhaust spilled from his accelerating vehicle. No doubt he was out of range as I hollered, “Do you think thieves go around in a helmet and attach blinking lights to the bikes they're stealing, you bullshit vigilante?!?”
As somebody who loves bicycles and has had mine stolen from me in the past, being called a bike thief is an unforgivable insult.
The next day I joined my parents for lunch at their home. At an impressively advanced age, my maternal grandmother had passed away earlier that week and my mother had a collection of photographs of her on display. The pictures spanned her entire lifetime from childhood, motherhood, vacation shots, snaps of her at the bowling alley that she ran with my grandfather, and photos of her as a proud and doting grandmother. As I flipped through the photos, I thought about how lucky I was that, for the first time in our lives, she spent her last two and a half years living in the same city as me. I was able to enjoy more time with her in these twilight years of hers than in the rest of our lives combined.
One of the photographs that particularly captivated me was taken when my grandmother was a young woman. She was standing on the sidewalk of what appeared to be a new suburb with boxcars rolling by in the background. With a shy smile emanating towards the camera, her hands casually steadied a gorgeous new bicycle.
During our talks over the past few years, she shared several whimsical stories of the pony, Scotty, that she and her younger brother used to ride from their family's farm to the schoolhouse when they were children. And up until somewhat recently, she was a confident and even somewhat reckless driver. But never had I, or could I have, imagined my grandmother riding a bicycle. Perhaps by the time that she reached her ninth decade, she couldn't either…
“Do you remember grandma riding a bike when you were young?” I asked my mother as she liberated a bubbling casserole dish from the oven.
“No, not that I can recall."
“Were you aware that she even knew how to ride a bike?”
“Nope.”
How I wished that I had seen the picture a couple of months ago when my grandmother was alive and conversant. Of course it could have been a neighbours’ bicycle, my grandmother merely posing with the novel machine for a photo opportunity. Or maybe she enjoyed cycling up until the time that her children became too much of a demand to keep up the habit. Perhaps her bike had been stolen and due to my grandparents’ tight financial circumstances, they weren't able to replace it. After all, as long as there were bicycles to steal, there must have been bike thieves. And perhaps I should be more sympathetic to the “bullshit vigilante” of the night before — maybe he was just out looking for his own stolen bike.
It's undeniable that mysteries big and small make life more interesting, and I can't help being impressed that my grandmother — daughter of a Lutheran minister, childhood church organist, mother of six, grandmother of 11, great-grandmother of seven, wife of 53 years and widow of 15 more, the proprietress of a pool hall and later a bowling alley, and possibly an inactive cyclist who definitely ran the risk of getting kicked out of hospice at age 93 for not dying — can still surprise us even after the candle of her life has flickered out.
