My Last Bike

 

I sold my bike last week. The sweet blue Trek mountain bike that I salvaged from a Marketplace app and put a hundred and fifty bucks into making it a pretty bike again.

I set my asking price low, and a nice man named Benjamin drove all the way from Corona to pick it up, handing me a wad of cash as he lifted the bike off the porch.

“Everything works?” he asked.

“Yes,” I told him. “I would jump on it and show you, but I can’t ride it anymore.”

“Thank you,” he said, and he was gone.

Benjamin was buying the bike for his daughter, so I’d asked him to send me a picture later of her on the bike, and he agreed… because I told him on the phone I might be crying when he took the bike. And I was.

Two years ago, after another grueling bout with sciatica, I spent weeks working with a physical therapist to get my hips aligned. (My right hip will always have joint dysfunction due to an old injury, which misaligns my left hip… which leads to bouts of excruciating sciatica.)

If you’ve ever had sciatica, you know that recovery takes weeks because the nerve is angry, and nerves (like some people) are unforgiving…. I did my exercises faithfully, pulling my hips back into alignment every day, stretching all those muscles and tendons and whatever else needed adjustment.

Finally recovered, I gave it one more week, and decided to go for a quick spin on the bike that I hadn’t been able to ride for months. Woo hoo! I thought, as I glided down my street. Finally! Then I turned the corner and began to pedal uphill, and as I did, my left hip slid right back over—in one agonizing motion—to where it had been before all that hard work had started. It was all I could do to turn around and coast back home.

My physical therapist had warned me about this. I’d asked her, a bit jokingly, if I would ever be able to ride my bike again, and she had responded with a frown and encouraged me to work on becoming pain free, then maybe….

But no. I parked my bike in the spare room when I got home and it sat for two years, gathering dust. I had no desire to revisit the pain I’d felt when my hip rolled back into its old position against my spine.

Six months later, I brought home a young cattle dog with the same energy as half a dozen five-year-olds at a birthday party, and I knew I had to commit to walking her three times a day. Even if I could ride my bike, when would I find time?

This is what aging looks like. It’s about losing things, giving up things. It’s why my mom always said, “Getting old is not for sissies.” It’s not. In some ways, it’s absolutely heartbreaking.

I’ve always had a bike. When I retired, I owned three, a road bike, a mountain bike, and a beach cruiser. I love bicycles—as a means of transportation, as a means of recreation, as the simple but brilliant machine that they are. I held onto my bike for two years because, even though I knew I’d never ride it again, I couldn’t bear to give it up, to give in to the inevitable.

This is a taste, I know, of how I will feel when I give up my car keys. When I can no longer drive safely and have to depend on others to take me places or fetch me things. But that’s a long way off… I hope.

For now, I try not to think about what I will have to give up next. At this moment, in this day, my mind still feels sharp. My fingers are still quick and agile on the keyboard. I’m still writing poetry and memoir pieces. I’m still walking that little cattle dog three times a day and taking her out to the wildlands a couple times a week so we can breathe in the scent and oxygen of trees and experience the wonder and beauty of Nature. Life is good… in spite of its losses.

Benjamin's daughter on her new bike. "She loves it," he said, which made me smile.