It is unbecoming of an adult person to pull on a leotard and a pair of tap shoes and venture out in public with a plastic toy between their legs, and yet, legions of us are captive to this fetish. Why?
I learned the Lord’s Prayer in 3rd grade, when my parents enrolled me in a private, religious school after we moved to Mobile, Alabama. As the child of atheists, I had never actually heard it before, but I was expected to recite each day before school. I couldn’t quite figure out what my daily bread was, nor what it meant to trespass against someone.
“Deliver us from evil,” though. That I understood, although the concept seemed pretty abstract when I was 7-years-old. I was fortunate not to have experienced any evil just yet.
From the day we came down from the trees, humans have had the ideas of good and evil, although the connotations of those terms have probably evolved significantly along with the size of our pre-frontal cortices. Our desire to be delivered remains unchanged.
Recently, a friend said to me, “I have squandered so much time riding bikes, time that I probably ought to have devoted to my family or my job.” And I said to him, “Life creates all manner of pressure, and every boiler needs an outlet.”
The day my first child was born was a bad day, and yes, I know how that sounds. The delivery had been difficult, harrowing in fact. We hadn’t slept the night before, and my nerves were raw from worry. My wife was, not surprisingly, exhausted and needed me to care for our son while she did her best to recuperate. And so, I walked the halls of the delivery ward with this brand-new human for whom I was now responsible. The sheer overwhelm of it all very nearly crushed my addled mind.
Life is like this. Even the beautiful parts are sometimes gallingly hard.
In the first years of my kids’ lives, both of them, my primary escape was via bicycle, even if that only meant the ride work. To quote the philosopher H.I. McDunnough, “Junior needs Huggies.” And the two immovable forces of work and family began to squeeze me like a trash compactor crushing Luke Skywalker in the first, or fourth depending on your perspective, Star Wars movie. The bike, the process of turning the pedals, the feeling of moving forward, the sweat, the interstice between office and home, was always there for me.
When my father died. When my brother died. The bike.
Maybe it’s a stretch to talk about the challenges we all face as evil. I don’t know. What I can tell you is that the face value of a common tragedy is nothing compared to the havoc it creates between a person’s ears as it echoes in the days and weeks and months and years after.
And I could always ride away, at least for a while, delivered for a time, in leotard and tap shoes.