I have a new game I play,
when I am slogging up the steep hills out of my neighborhood, bicycling to the
train that takes me into the city for work. I pretend I am just out for a bike
ride.
Well, I am, out for a
bike ride -- to work.
Take away “work,” and “bike
ride” opens up to blue spring skies and that robin chasing a moth; the bank of
tiger lilies on Westmoreland Avenue; the smiling face at the hardware store,
where the manager is setting up plants for sale on the sidewalk. On the steep
inclines, I think about the spinning class I took once, and how people pay to
have an instructor help them muscle their way through the higher resistance
settings on a stationary bike, when I have that resistance built right into the
hill on Elm Avenue. On the downhill, I revel in that giddy feeling I get when
the first sleeveless tops of the season come out of the closet and the warmth of
late spring hits my bare arms.
This works anywhere.
On metro, climbing the
escalator, I notice the patterns the escalator makes, and think what a
beautiful photograph that would make. I see the shoes on the woman in front me,
sensible but stylish flats, perfect with the skirt, and I think how fresh it
all would seem if I were on, say, the Paris metro. Those shoes would be Parisian,
that face so very French. And I remember that even standing in line at a
drugstore is exciting, when you’re in a foreign country.
Why not here?
So I pretend I am on vacation and feel the rhythm of the train on the tracks, notice the spray of dreadlocks sprouting from a ponytail on a young man’s head, the years etched on a Latina woman’s face, how some riders are absorbed in their iPhones and others are drifting in and out of sleep.
I look forward to running the gauntlet of homeless men who sit like a brotherhood of ruffians just outside Union Station, the one in the wheelchair beaming, “hello,” shiny bald pate gleaming in the sun.
That purple shirt,
those orange curls, the symmetry of the brick sidewalk, that perfectly framed
view of the Capitol building.
And then, I’m at work,
and the tour is over – unless the weather holds, and then I’ll be back out on the
sidewalk on my way to the park for lunch.
