LOVE THURSDAY

I had this really great restored Schwinn. Chris bought it from our friend Brian for my birthday one year. It was so cool with red and white streamers and an Om symbol painted on the side. It was just the loveliest tooling around bicycle. Except it had zero gears. In the flat lands of Oklahoma, I could easily get away with that, but not here in the rolly hills of Missouri (have you guys seen my drive way?!?). But I hung onto that bike. I just wasn't ready to part with it. A friend had rebuilt it and Chris had purposefully gifted it to me. I mean, come on, Om symbol? This was made for me. Finally I decided that it was time to let it go. It wasn't right to keep a bike I knew I was never going to ride. I posted the bike on Craigslist and a week later I sold it to a Rockabilly dude who had an old Chevy truck he'd restored in the same colors. He wanted the bicycle to ride around on at car shows. I thought I would have been sad at letting that bike go. It was important to me. It was a symbol or a token of love. It was the kind of bike where you had to back peddle to brake, the kind I rode when I first learned to ride a bicycle. There was something nostalgic about owning that bike and it was sweet of Chris to have had it built just for me. I had visions of tooling over to farmers' markets or riding around with kittens in the basket. Maybe I'd even wear a red bandanna on my head. The reality was that when I lived in an area with few hills, I did not live in a bicycle friendly neighborhood. We were too far from anything cool or interesting to ride the bike to. Also, I was alone. Chris didn't have a bike and when he finally got one, his knee was all messed up and he couldn't ride it. So, not only did I not have a place to ride my bike, I had no one to ride with. It turned out that getting rid of the bike was less of a sad endeavor than actually owning the bike and not ever riding it.

It also helped knowing that the old bike went to a good home. Of course my old vintage Schwinn, painted black with red trim, dice shaped valve caps, Om symbol, and red and white handle bar streamers was meant for a Rockabilly dude with a vintage Chevy. I still have visions of tooling around town on a bicycle. There is a really great trail called the Katy trail (it's a state park!). The trail stretches from Clinton to Machens and I think it would be fun to do it in stretches. Those things were just never going to happen on that old bike, but those things can be a reality on the new bike. Oh...yeah...I got a new bicycle. I know very little about it other than it has twenty something gears that I have to learn how to use and new tire tubes (that I learned how to replace). But I'm pretty excited about it.

Happy Love Thursday!