30th
Biking for Dummies
I love biking around the neighborhood - I used to ride my bike in my hood all the time when I was a kid until I became Too Cool for such things. Thank Go everything comes back full circle. When I was 12, my parents bought me the bike I’d always wanted: A Huffy Cruiser in Electric Blue, with white-walled tires and little protective coverings over the tops of the tires.
I was in heaven. I’d ride around on that all day, wishing I lived in a town where I could ride to the store and get a milkshake from the soda jerk and spin around on my seat at the counter and look out at my pretty bike. Instead, I lived in small town that was made up of suburbs and Taco Bells and such. We did have a Dairy Queen that the teens would cruise around on a Friday night (ending up parking at the car wash - the place to be seen), but all of the chain restaurants were way too far away and on dangerous roads for me to go sit there and look at my bike. So I had to be happy with my suburban neighborhood, being careful of the pair of Dobermans that sometimes got out of their yard, and the mean boys who would yell things at me and sometimes chase me when I rode by.
Unfortunately, these rides only lasted about six months until I was Too Cool for a bike and too busy chasing those mean boys around in the neighborhood, riding around in cars instead of bikes and making my debut as the youngest addition to the car wash cruisers.
So when I moved here to city life, I started to see the benefits of having a bike again. Since that beautiful blue Huffy had only been used very little in its life (and since I hadn’t grown all that much taller), my parents mailed it to me for my 25th birthday so I could ride around Brooklyn. It was wonderful, but my Huffy weighed 45 pounds, and because I’d just moved here, this city was wayyy too scary for my taste, so the poor thing ended up being ridden just around my block, never to any Soda Jerks, though it did make its way o a few jerks’ apartments on occasion. Eventually, after a few moves, I lost the key to my lock, and there my Huffy sat in the winter at the bottom of the stairs, begging to be ridden. Pretty soon, someone obliged it by taking it off my hands without my knowledge. I am sure that Huffy is livin it up somewhere, hopefully by a 12 year old that knows how to appreciate it.
So recently, I decided to go buy a grown ass woman’s bike. I went to B’s Bikes on Eckford and Driggs in my neighborhood (the Point of Green), and asked these fine young gentlemen what their opinions were. They were short n’ sweet: “Pick one and ride it around some, see if you like it.” So I did just that, and ended up with this fine beauty:
Gears! It has gears! Seven of them, actually. And brakes, real working brakes! And a bell!
I love my new bicycle.
