Refreshing commute

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.