Pax Plena – Page 24

Tucson’s Newest Cyclist

Years ago my wife Gwyn lived in an Amish commune where all forms of modern transportation were shunned. Alas, she never learned to ride a bicycle.

I kid, I kid. Gwyn isn’t Amish.

But it is true that for various reasons (viz. reasons I do not know) my Dear Wife never learned how to ride a bike as a kid.

After making a post on Twitter about our bike lessons last week, I was surprised to hear from various friends and readers that first-time, adult cycling is not an isolated phenomenon. Turns out, there are quite a few folks who have never learned to ride two-wheelers as kids. Growing up in Oklahoma, I just took it for granted that every child knew how to ride a bike. It was the quickest way to get to the mailbox from Grandma’s. It was the quickest way to get to school from Mom’s. And bikes were much easier for a ten year-old to drive than the Gator, although the Gator was driven plenty when it came for fishing. Suffice it to say, life on the farm was markedly different than life in metro-area, Tucson, and times have changed mightily.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, I tried to help Gwyn learn to ride a bike, using my trusty steed. But the tires on my road bike were way too narrow for a new rider to learn on. She did a fine job of balancing, but when it came time to peddle, she ended up losing control, getting frustrated with a bike she simply wasn’t prepared to ride. To her credit, she never wrecked the bike, which is more than I can say for myself, and in fact, she didn’t even take a tumble. But after a few hours in the drive way, it was clear that a road bike was not a good way to begin learning how to ride.

Over the weekend, we decided that the best way for her to learn to ride would be to buy her a bike that was better suited to her comfort level. We considered three criteria in shopping for a new bike: 1) A bike with wide tires to make for easier balancing, 2) One that allowed for the rider to ride upright rather than bent over, and 3) A bike that was not so expensive that she would be afraid to wreck it in the event of a fall. For the record, the last point was made more out of practicality than a sense of fatalism of Gwyn’s biking ability. One’s wallet cries a lot less when wrecking a cheap Schwinn, than when one wrecks a Novara Verita Bike – at least my wallet does.

Given that our main concern was cost, our bike shopping took us to Wal-Mart where we happened upon the ladies’ Schwinn Admiral above. The bike boasts seven speeds, front and rear breaks, SRAM grip shifters, Shimano rear derailleurs, a bike rack, and a solid, steel frame. The bike seemed like a smart purchase, but what really sold her on this bike was its aesthetics – as you can see in the photo, it has a certifiably cool, retro look, coupled with extreme comfort while riding. Add to this a $149 price tag, and it was an easy purchase decision to make.

Gwyn will still need a lot of practice before she takes to the bike lanes along Skyline and Sunrise. But the change between a bike that was appropriate for her experience level, as opposed to my road bike, was remarkable. The last time we practiced riding, we spent at least two hours just learning how to balance on my road bike. But within 15 minutes of getting the new bike adjusted, Gwyn had already mastered balancing on the bike, pushing off with her dominant foot, and pedaling unaided down the driveway. Before we called it an evening, she even felt comfortable making slow, 360 degrees turns!

Needless to say, I was quite proud of her.

I think there were probably two lessons that we took from the two bike-learning experiences.

First, a little patience goes a long way. This is an obvious lesson, but people have innately different senses of balance and caution. What works for one may not work for another, and this was difficult for me to remember. I just assumed that since it was easy for me to take up road biking, my wife would take to it as well. Really, what she needed was a bike that was better suited to her experience level.

Walk before you run, as they say.

Second, for adults learning to ride a bike, do yourself a favor and find a bike that you feel comfortable riding. Don’t ride a bike simply because it’s available. In terms of fit, Gwyn fell in love with her Schwinn hybrid because it allowed her to put both feet on the ground with ease. She also liked the comfy seat, and wide handle bars. At the end of the day, she loves her bike because it makes her feel comfortable to ride. And that’s the point really: if it isn’t fun, and it isn’t comfortable, don’t ride it. There are plenty of bikes available that can meet your needs.

Today we conquered the driveway. Tomorrow we might very well try the bike path. After that, who knows? Maybe one day we’ll conquer the world.

August 21, 2011
My Beta Fish Died Today

Our beta fish, Maestro, died this afternoon.

He fell ill early last weekend. He started acting strangely, floating on his side during the day, lying down on his side during the night. Soon his behavior became much more erratic. Without warning, he would sprint to the top of his tank for air, and allow himself to sink slowly back down to the bottom. After these fits of swimming, Maestro invariably came to rest on the smooth river rocks that lined the base of his tank. I like to think the cold stones gave him comfort.

When his illness began, my first instinct was to change his water, and this seemed to help. He showed a little sign of improvement, swimming around the tank, rather than swimming on his side. All seemed well for a day or two.

But last night the same symptoms came back. This morning I found him resting on the cool rocks again, his gills weakly breathing. Food held no interest to him. I can’t imagine fish having overly complex minds. But it seemed like our little friend had simply lost the will to live.

This afternoon, I checked on him knowing the end was near. I found him in his favorite corner of the tank. He was already gone. But he looked at peace.

Maestro’s tank sits empty now, beneath the windows in our living room. It’s strange that a fish so small, could bring our lives such joy.

August 17, 2011
Little Pricks

The piece I wrote earlier in the week about Ben Stein and the economic meltdown has weighed on my mind lately. It isn’t a newsflash, but today’s headlines abundantly suggest that we live in an era of unprecedented economic uncertainty, and global unrest.

Rioters in London burned their own homes in protest of UK budget cuts.

Wall Street twists in the economic winds – soaring on the smallest glimmer of economic hope, crashing with the least bit of turbulence.

Earlier in the week, naysayers warned of a Post-American planet, drearily musing whether we had already spent ourselves into oblivion.

Meanwhile, others have taken a fancy to questioning the value of higher education, as if society would be helped by the masses remaining uneducated, helpfully observing that most Americans are wasting money on anything more than a high school diploma (special reference made to law students).

In fact, people have become so fed up with bad news that nearly 200,000 people cancelled their cable TV subscriptions in the last quarter alone.

Not even President Obama gets a break. The latest poll numbers, bless his heart, show Generic Republican besting President Obama 47% to 42%. And just a couple of days ago his vacation home on Martha’s Vineyard burned down (not really, but it did catch fire).

Make of the above what you will, but it seems fair to say that times are tough.

As the adage goes, desperate times call for desperate measures, so it seemed only appropriate to draw some words of wisdom from the Bible – just in case. Serendipitously, the writings of an old friend from high school (published on Facebook, no less), turned my weary eye to the fifth chapter of St. Paul’s letter to the Romans.

Paul writes:

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Romans 5.1

I won’t say the winds instantly calmed when I read the verse above. But something like that happened. I looked outside of the kitchen window, and saw our cactus sitting on the porch, warming in the sun, its tiny pricks of yellow gingerly reaching toward skies of blue. It occurred to me, that the world economy could crash this afternoon, and my cactus couldn’t care any less. So long as my wife provides it the occasional drink of water, it will thrive regardless of the calamities besetting the kingdoms of men.

I can’t help but think the cactus has it right. The little prick. At risk of being over broad, the verse above strikes me as the simplest statement of Christianity ever written. At its core, the message is a compact one of assurance, written to all those twisting in the winds of the stock market, written to all those questioning whether their education is worth the price, and written to all those forced to watch Netflix Streaming because they cancelled their Cable TV package.

The message is that faith in Christ yields peace with God. Nothing more. Nothing less.

The other stirring aspect of the short verse is that it is without qualification. It does not assure peace only to stockbrokers. It does not assure peace if only we make the appropriate spending cuts accompanied by corresponding ‘revenue increases.’ The point is plain. Those justified by faith have peace with God. Period.

Now, Stein’s article questions the premise of our calamitous world entirely. “Meltdown? What meltdown?” he would say. While it’s fair to question the origins of the situation, it’s also disingenuous to deny the phenomenon altogether. As my wife and I wait for student loans to come in, the reality of hard times is clear to us. We see similar concern among our circle of friends – mostly young professionals, and students, or some combination of the two.

By contrast, Paul more or less takes the same approach to reality as my cactus Paul says, embrace reality. Sometimes life sucks, but come what may, those justified by faith have peace with God. It will be ok.

And if that conclusion is good enough for my cactus, well, it’s good enough for me.

PS: I realize the many jokes I could have made when I titled this post ‘little pricks.’ Most lawyers, Tiger Woods, and Ron Paul all come to mind. But gentle readers, I can only hope that my effort at more reflective commentary will compensate for lone cheap laugh I tried to get.

UPDATE: Ben Stein adds some more thoughts in today’s (8/12/2011) essay on the ‘meltdown,’ and reaches somewhat similar conclusions to those I reached yesterday:

6. The speculators do not have all power. There is only One who has all power and I live by His rules, not by the rules of fear and panic peddled by some cable TV systems.

So, I can keep some perspective and go on with my life after all.

And I can look out on this magnificent mountain lake and think how it must laugh at stock markets and the affairs of men.

[Link]

Stein’s lake laughs at the affairs of men, much like my little cactus laughed when I picked it up.

August 11, 2011
My First Bike Wreck

It was inevitable. My coordination and dexterity levels are somewhere around those of the African Bush Elephant.

Today, while riding down Tucson’s Ft. Lowell Road, near the intersection of Ft. Lowell and Dodge, I hit a rough patch of pavement that sent me head over handlbars, off my bike. Fortunately for me, the asphalt broke my fall.

When I got up, the first thing I did was look around to see if anyone saw me. I’m not sure why I do this every time I fall. It’s not as if I have any more dignity to preserve at that point. Alas, this spill must have been particularly nasty since a local businessman came out of his shop to check on me. Fortunately, only my pride was seriously hurt at the time. I’d give the man’s business a plug, but I was too dazed to notice where he came from except that it was out of one of the shops.

Once I had gathered my bearings, and feebly called my wife for a lift and first aid, I took a quick look at the scourge that caused my spill. Turns out, there’s a 15 yard stretch of bike lane, eastbound along Ft. Lowell Road that makes the infrastructure of entire third-world countries seem desirable. Unfortunately, while I was humming along about 20mph, I didn’t see the massive hole until it was too late.

In truth, the fall could have been much worse than it was. The bike lane at that point isn’t very wide, so a speeding car in the outside lane would have been a real problem for me. But the reality is that I escaped with only a swollen wrist, and a couple of gashes from the fall.

My bike came out of the incident relatively unscathed as well. The only battle wounds that resulted were scrapes on my left Shimano Shifter.

I suppose if there’s a moral to this story, it’s that the City of Tucson still has work to do to make its cycling infrastructure both convenient and safe. I suppose if I had broken my wrist I would be less forgiving, but as they say in basketball, “no harm, no foul.” The problem with this view, of course, is that the next bike rider who comes along and wrecks in the same spot may not be so lucky.

August 3, 2011
Before and After Workout Exhibit

The website My Modern Met showcased an interesting art exhibit earlier this week by French photog Sacha Goldberger.

One half of the layout shows pictures of joggers that have just completed a brisk workout. The second half of the layout shows the same joggers in professional attire, posing in the same light, and manner as they had the week before.

According to Goldberger, the photos are intended:

“To show the difference between our natural and brute side versus how we represent ourselves to society,” Goldberger tells us. “The difference was very surprising.”

[Link]

Here’s an example of Goldberger’s work, courtesy of My Modern Met.

Goldberger’s premise isn’t terribly insightful. Everyone presents an image of self to the world around us. But the exhibit is dramatic in that it underscores just how highly constructed the image we present to society actually is. Think about how much of our day is spent maintaining the image we wish to present.

Your morning shower. A, hopefully, daily ritual to evince good hygiene, and keep one’s bodily odors at bay. Why? So that you and your co-workers can co-exist in relative, cubical harmony.

The clothes you wear. As one fashion blog put it, the entire fashion industry exists for the sole purpose of producing ‘wearable art.’ I kid you not. They really said that. By this logic, you choose to wear clothes that make an artistic statement about you to the rest of the world. My t-shirt and jeans, for example, probably say to the rest of the world, “I hate you.”

The car you drive. Chevy struck advertising gold in the early 2000s in its effort to persuade Americans that you are what you drive. While trying to hawk its massive, and over-priced Silverado pick-up trucks, Chevy cleverly implemented the tagline “Like a rock.” Alas, this would be the last clever thing Chevy ever did.

The point of the “like a rock” campaign was that “you may be a bit soft about the gut, but by God if you drive a Chevy you’re just like a rock all the same.” According to the Wall Street Journal, the “like a rock” campaign was so successful among middle-age men, Chevy just might bring it back. The point, of course, is that the vehicle you drive says something about you to society.

For example, one good friend, who shall remain nameless, drives a Kia Spectra circa. 2004. His choice of car says to society, “Please, don’t hit me. But if you must hit me, I have lots of insurance.” Yes, my good friend is an attorney. My own, battered Chevy Colorado says, “I decided to start law school in the desert west before the economy tanked, and moved here from a major city where I didn’t need a car. This is all I could afford.”

The accessories you carry to work. Being but a lowly student, I don’t have a real job per se. But since I am a student, I’ve given considerable thought to the kind of backpack I carry. I think my Timbuk 2 bag tells society, “I could be a hipster, in a real city.” And once society believes what the bag tells them, it says, “I kid, I kid! The limeade racing stripe was supposed to let you in on the joke.”

Etc.

I suppose I’ve quite belabored the point by now. But the exhibit really is interesting in that it underscores how nearly the entirety of our waking existence is spent shrouding the image on the left in the trappings of the image on the right. Naturally, this doesn’t address the real question.

Exactly why do we care so much about what other people think of us?

July 28, 2011