Lost in the West - Life is a Wheel - page 104

Eventually, I listened to him, but it took a while. Living in Manhattan long before the
era of bike lanes, I didn't really see the prospect of riding around the city as inviting,
and anyway I'd never been a bicycle devotee, even as a kid.
There exists a photo of me—I can't have been older than three—astride a four-
wheeled contraption that looks like a bare-bones automobile chassis and grinning as
though I'm having a great old time. But growing up I was the last in my neighborhood
to seize the alchemy of pedaling and steering that keeps you upright on a bicycle. I
was somewhat famous for my failure, in fact, and can recall vividly the summer evening
when, already nine years old, I was suddenly blessed with the necessary physical revela-
tion and found myself finally wobbling down Van Buren Avenue on a squat green Huffy.
Up and down the block and around two corners, onto Palmer Avenue and then Herrick
Avenue, neighbors saw me and cheered. In the chamber of my mind where I've sealed
away my most embarrassing memories, the adolescent whine of my then best pal, Bobby
Cerone, someone I haven't seen or heard about in forty-five years, still echoes if I let it:
“Hey!” he cried when I passed his house that night. “Brucie's riding!”
That I was not a natural cyclist, that I was initially an indifferent and incompetent
one, strikes me now as one of the great, serendipitous ironies in my experience. 2 Obvi-
ously, I've been thinking about my life as a narrative lately, and it tickles me that the
way things are has evolved from the way things were. I'm titillated by the idea that I'm
living some sort of a story, that my earlier cycling self and my current one are intimately
related, that one has naturally followed the other in spite of how surprised I am by what
has happened, and that like the events in a good novel, the outcome was impossible to
predict looking forward but was inevitable looking back.