untitled random bike ride

Only at a certain time of year is it a perfect day for a bike ride and an ideal night for a fire. It happens to be the first week of spring, and my sedentary winter body was needing something - anything - after work, and luckily I seem to have stumbled onto the right decision for once.

Maybe it's because I wore a purple shirt. The email went out to the whole department several days ago that Thursday was the day to wear purple for cerebral palsy research, and uncharacterisically I complied. Usually I ignore the charity fundraising gift-basket raffle for restless leg research, but this time for no particular reason I wore purple. A Facebook friend wrote in purple prose; MadLab Theater is doing The Color: Purple this weekend. What's up with the zeitgeist?

Otherwise it was an ordinary workday. I got some stuff done, got a little lost, got found, amazing grace, corrected some mistakes, consulted with the content editors, and of course took longer than the guidelines indicated. By late afternoon I was bleary-eyed from staring at the screen, so I did a little qigong outside, but it was too little too late to be very productive past five o'clock. I wrote a little vignette for third graders about cars and suburbs in central swingstate that I will have to rewrite tomorrow. Put a fork in me, I'm done.

But the sun had come out in the meantime, and I paused near the basketball hoop in the parking lot on my way out, started to get out and shoot a few, but instead continued on home not looking forward to anything in particular. It was a bit chilly despite the sunshine, and I didn't even change clothes, just hopped on the old black Schvinn, checked the wind direction (north), and adhering to MacKenzie's First Law, headed north.

East on Park, north on Otterbein, east on College, north on Juniper, east on County Line, north on Spring, and I'm beginning to feel human again, breathing rhythmically and starting to break a slight sweat under my purple corduroy shirt. Being off the residential streets seemed to make a difference, and out on the exurban roads of Delaware County. Maybe I justed needed to get out of Dodge. Not that it really matters where you ride, as long as you get on your horse and ride.

I did pause to check the time, trying to gauge how far to go before turning around, in order to get back before it's totally dark outside, as I'm not a good judge of the sun's distance from the horizon in relation to my return trip from Galena or wherever I happen to end up. I started out thinking that 45 minutes out and 45 minutes back, or roughly 18 miles, is all I would have time and energy for, but this was not to be a systematic, clockwork orange handlebars kind of ride.

When I got to where Tussic intersects Old 3C, where you can see Hoover Reservoir through the trees on probably the prettiest part of the ride, I went north and took a left on Plumb, but instead of cutting south on the bike trail along Route 3, I kept going west on Plumb and hung a right on Rome Corners. I don't think I'd ever been there before, at least not on an early spring day like this, certainly not on a bike. It's a quiet country road with slight hills and a great place to daydream. I've found my spot, but the sun is about to hit the horizon, so I turned around and headed back, 45 minutes out.

Uneventful return trip: south on Rome Corners with the wind at my back, hang a left on Lewis Center, right on the bike trail by Route 3, cut across the Home Depot parking lot to McCorkle and I'm home at the stroke of eight. I'm not exhausted but I've had a nice workout, and that makes the Great Lakes Edmund Fitzgerald Handcrafted Porter taste so much better. It's already chilly, so I start a fire in the stove, read the Sunday paper while eating a veggie burger, and then spend an inordinate amount of time recounting the details of my day for a vast readership, but hey, oh ye of little faith, I guess I had something to look forward to after all.