So yesterday, I stopped at Mountain Home, ID specifically to visit a bike shop in the morning to replace my back tire, which started fraying. The shop didn't have the tire I wanted, so we put some duct tape on the inside of the tire and prayed to the air-pressure gods for safe travels.
With a pitiful smile only a long worn traveller can evoke, the gods of inner tube mishaps were held at bay heroically by the gods of air-pressure, joined together by the gods of duct tape. I wrote a poem about it.
To make a long story short, I bought a new tire, put it in the front, took my front tire, put it in the back. Mostly because the new tire I bought was skinnier, and I wanted the extra padding on the back to hold the weight of my gear.
On more or less my fourth day in America, meaning on about September 5 1987, I bought my red bike.
You see, owning a bike was fundamental to my existence. The seven years before, I biked and biked and biked. I biked from my home town of Kiryat Gat to Beer Sheva, then to Tel Aviv, and as I grew stronger, to Jerusalem. Later to the Galilee, then to the Dead Sea and then to Eilat, and then over again each time by different routes, because you see, Israel is small. Then I started biking weekly from home to my dorm room in Tel Aviv (only years later I learned to do my laundry on my own, so back then I had to go back to mom sufficiently often). Then I met Hadas and taught her to bike and she became my best biking partner ever, and we did everything again, and again, and again, because Israel remained the same size and we got stronger yet.
So of course I had to have an excellent bike in America, right away. I'd bike to the other end!
September 2 I flew in (the date is etched in my mind. I dreamed about it for much of my last few months in Israel, and Hadas even made me a T shirt with the date printed on it). September 3 I took the bus from my relatives' in New Rochelle to Princeton. September 4 I walked from the Graduate College to the work address of the adoptive parent assigned to me by the university, on Nassau cross Harrison (I was so spaced out - I took it almost literally - they were thinking "invite an international student for dinner once", and I was thinking a true and meaningful relationship. Their version prevailed). On the way I noted Jay's Cycles, and on September 5, I had a fancy red bike.
Too fancy, perhaps. Before leaving Israel my dad gave me $600 - the stash of foreign currency he had, and quite a lot of money. (In cash, of course. Back then children didn't have credit cards, especially not if they were foreign). It was supposed to last me until the fellowships were to kick in, about a month later. The bike was advertised at about $400 - I knew it was borderline, but the bike really looked great. And I wasn't ready yet for the strange American custom of adding 15% or so to every price only at the cashier, as a reminder that the government is taking its cut. So I had maybe $150 left to last me a month, and I had to borrow a little from my former instructor Dubiner, now a post-doc in Princeton, and then some more from some university office that gave temporary support to disoriented kids.
I rode my red bike to New Hope, and to the Jersey shore, and to northern Jersey, and New York, and once even to New Haven (I came back by bus, in time to meet Cécile, with whom my imagination had plans).
But Hadas wasn't there, and Jennifer agreed only once, and when Yael reappeared I cared much more about driving my green monster to Boston, and biking became a thing of my past. Yes, I took the red bike with me when I moved to Boston, but I hardly used it. And then to Jerusalem, where I used it even less. And then to Toronto, where it survived our big house fire (I don't remember where it was) and then it mostly lay in the basement with slowly rotting tires.
It had resigned to its Buzz and Woody fate. It never really believed that the moment will come that it will be pedaled again, farther than ever, by someone who fills its original owner with more pride than if he had pedaled it himself.
Today I biked for 85km over the course of about four and a half hours.