The Bike I Came Home On

School started, both High School where I teach and Graduate School where I am picking up more Highly Qualified endorsements after my Masters, to teach wider and deeper.  Writing lags just a tad.

I am traveling this weekend and taking the LeMond with me, not the Rivendell.  They are as dissimilar as one can explain.  From the frame to the flaws and back again they have different souls and experiences.  The Old Bike can’t go across the country anymore, my mechanic tells me, the frame has already cracked once.  It has commuter pedals and fenders but a road bike heart when I get on it.  I refuse to get sentimental about it.

Part of why it travels with me is many bikes that go in the Westy return “altered” and not for the better.  I know that I loaded it for the fun of it, whatever happens, as part of it contains a fragment of my biking soul.  It is part of the link I share with my son, a link that will live beyond the life of the bike, a reason that explains the Brooks saddle remaining on it while a new one, quite needlessly, was purchased for the new bike.

That bike,and that Brooks saddle, was the ride my son brought me home on.