Biking my age

What’s a guy your age doing buying a bike like that?

No, I haven’t lost my mind. But it is strange for a man pressing 80 to buy a bicycle. I don’t owe you an explanation, but I will give you one anyway.

Bicycling is one of my favorite outdoor activities. I used to enjoy walking, too. But “balance issues” began to affect my walking a several years ago, and now I need a cane or trekking pole to walk safely—especially in open spaces like the outdoors.

But put me on a bike, and it’s as if nothing’s wrong. My bicycle balance seems to be what it always has been, and I ride with hardly a thought about falling.

But another issue increasingly complicated my relationship with my beloved Specialized Crosstrail, size XXL. A year ago I began to have difficultly swinging my leg over the seat the get on and off the bike. And when I pushed it out of the garage this past March, I could not make that move at all. I felt too unsteady, and feared falling to the pavement with the bike on top of me. Was it because of the new left knee I got just about a year ago? Or was it…age?

I knew I could ride my bike, if I could get on it. Would I have to give up forever the freedom and joy of riding, a favorite activity that connected me, almost magically, to my youth? I began to search for alternatives, and that’s when I discovered step-through bikes.

Well, not really, There’s always been step-through bikes, and I’d always known about them, but they were called girls’ bikes. In another sign of society’s changing gender nomenclature, what had been binary (boys’ bikes vs. girls’ bikes) was now something in between, both and neither, something new that had actually been around all the time but we just didn’t know it. Who said a small difference in bicycle anatomy had to single a simple either/or, one-or-the-other bicycle gender?

I began to look for XXL-sized step-though bikes, and although they are out there somewhere (I think), I wanted to stay in a reasonable price range. So, the friendly staff at Joy Machines Bike Shop on Cleveland’s near west side helped me find the Jamis Citizen 2 pictured above, and modify it to make it work for me: longer saddle post (to which I attached what is definitely not a “comfort” seat), and a rack on the back where I carry a folding trekking pole in case I get stranded and have to walk a distance.

When I first got my Specialized bike, I put toe-clip pedals on it. A few years later I replaced them with regular pedals, fearful I could no longer easily make the quick motion needed to get out of them in an emergency. I didn’t like the change, but I knew I had to get used to it, and I have.

Now I’ve made another change. It’s what we do as we age if we want to keep living the best lives we can live. We must learn to adapt to the changes forced upon us by the years if we want to continue to live fully in the present.

My new bike is a metaphor for much of what is happening in my life these days. And it’s also a heck of a lot of fun.

Surrounded by family?

It’s become the norm for obituaries to report that their subject died (passed, went to Jesus, left this life, etc.) “surrounded by family.” I do not believe we’ve been offered this detail in obituaries until recently, and now it’s everywhere, apparently expected. Who could want otherwise?

“Surrounded by family” creates the image of a crowd of loving people gathered around the bedside of the dying person just at the moment of death.

I frankly doubt that this actually happens as often as it is reported. Maybe it’s a way of saying the person died “surrounded by the love and care and prayers of family,” which could well happen often. But literally…all or most family members crowded around a hospital bed in a tiny room, or gathered in a home all together at just the right moment when death finally comes? How often does that really happen?

Most deaths, even those that are expected, are unpredictable. Based on my experience as a pastor, I would say that much as families may think they should keep watch until an expected death finally occurs, few members of any family have the time or the freedom to wait around day after day, expecting it to happen soon. People have jobs, they have children and families to attend to, they are scattered far and wide geographically, and most of all, they just get exhausted and need to get away to get some sleep. Kind nurses often suggest family members care for themselves by going home and resting. Sadly, that’s sometimes when death happens.

Which can lead to guilt: I was there for days. Why didn’t I stay just a little longer? I feel so guilty about leaving them to die alone. No one needs that.

I wonder, too, if there are not many situations in which the dying person would rather some family members had stayed away. Feigned affection at the end of life is no substitute for the real thing during it. Maybe a sibling who has been hurtful for a lifetime is determined to be there at death, and adds to the hurt. Maybe the dying would just like to rest in peace before they die, not surrounded by a crowd of people who’ve long run out of things to say to one another, much less to the one whose death they are awaiting.

I am not against wanting to be with a loved one at death, and trying to gather family as it approaches. But reality often makes that impossible and perhaps even not desirable. Maybe there are times when just one or two beloved persons, representing all the caring family and friends who made life worth living for the dying one, is all that is needed. “Surrounding the dying” may not be the best thing for everyone in every situation, comforting as it sounds. Why make it seem as if it is?

Our Brutalist Birdbath

Introductions

Our Brutalist birdbath’s dull gray poured concrete displays only the vaguest of decorative touches. It it is so heavy that it nearly roots itself into the earth. Birds fly to it on its terms.

We bought it at Heckinger’s Hardware when we lived in southern Maryland, just south of the District of Columbia. We hauled it home, and lugged it to the tree-shrouded back yard of our modest church-owned manse. What a joy it would be to attract birds into our view!

I cannot remember how successful the bath was its first few years. Our daughters were born during that time, and I was serving my first solo church, and there were many distractions. It was spring-time for our family. I suspect I kept the bath filled with water during the hot and steamy summers, because I do things like that. More squirrels than birds may have enjoyed it.

In 1982 we moved our millstone-like birdbath to Illinois, and then, in 1989, to Ohio. That summer, as we settled into the suburban Cleveland home we were to call ours for three decades, I set it up in our back yard and filled it. 

Spring

Every spring for nearly fifty years, I have planted my feet firmly on the ground, and heave-hoed our birdbath’s shallow basin up on its pedestal.

Every spring I’ve worked diligently to set it just right. Water in that basin, like oil sealed in a carpenter’s level, tells me if it is only slightly out of kilter. After several tries, I either get it just right or give up. Most often it spends the summer pretty close to being level…not that the birds care.

And every spring it weighs just a little more than it weighed the year before.

Summer

We moved our birdbath with us to our retirement home in February, 2020, where it is most popular with the birds in late spring and early summer. The grassy rise outside our east windows is dotted with bird-filled trees. Robins, sparrows, flickers, finches, cardinals, crows, and more all fly to and from it during nesting season, taking a break from their parental responsibilities. One day we watched a hawk splash around in it. The other morning a pair of crows—side-by-side—was taking turns drinking from it.

I keep it filled with fresh water, occasionally scrubbing it clean with a wire brush to remove the greenish-black scum that grows on the bottom during summer’s long sun-filled days and moonlit nights. Once I ignored my housekeeping responsibilities toward our birdbath so long that mosquito larvae came to life in its dirty water.

As lazy summer drifts by, our birdbath’s visitors are reduced to thirsty squirrels. It needs filling less and less often, and I tend to forget it’s there, and its joys.

Autumn

Then, one day, it’s fall. Just like that. Fall’s rich odors are in the air, winter’s coming chill is in the wind.

Leaves and other debris float down into its dry basin. Once in a while, walking by, I brush them out of it onto the ground, and tell myself that’s it’s almost time to put it away for the winter. A thin sheet of ice floating on top of water left by rain the day before finally forces my hand. I don’t want to let water freeze hard and deep into it and risk cracking it, even though I am almost certain that would never happen.

Winter

One cool day I again plant my feet firmly in the ground and lift our birdbath’s basin off its pedestal. I used to carry both pieces of it off to shelter under a nearby tree for the winter, but now I just lean the basin against the pedestal right where it’s at.

Temperatures fall, rain is replaced by snow, and my disassembled birdbath withstands it all with nary a whimper. Concrete was made for such unfeeling. I can calculate how deep snow is by how far it reaches up the pedestal. It joins the barren trees and shrubs rooted in the grounds around it in promising the restart of life in a few months. Our birdbath may be inanimate but, strangely, even with its age spots, it is not dead.

I hope that before long I will again heave-ho our birdbath’s basin back up onto its pedestal. I trust the promise of life renewed, including mine.

Happy birthday, and how free will she be?

I’m thinking about our granddaughter’s birthday today, and wondering how free she will be to make decisions about her one precious life and body in the decade between now and her 21st birthday.

I fear her freedom will be sharply limited by the Republican party in cahoots with a theologically compromised evangelical Christianity and a politically compromised judicial system.

Under no circumstances would she have the choice of a medically safe abortion. She would not be free to enjoy a legally-protected loving relationship with another woman. She would not be free to change her gender if she realizes she is not the gender she was assigned at her birth.

People eager to limit other’s rights should focus on one person they truly love and ask what if? about their futures and freedom. How doing that would change the discussion!

Now to the politics of it…

The New York Times published an article this morning about Doug Mastriano, who is running for the Republican party’s nomination for governor of Pennsylvania. He’s very conservative, so much so that the Republican establishment in the Keystone State is said to be worried that he might get the nomination.

The article was accompanied by a picture of Mastriano wearing a t-shirt on which is printed, “Walk as free people,” and under it in small print, “John 8:36,” or so I think it says. That citation is a bit fuzzy, and that’s not how John 8:36 reads. In any case, what purports to be a Christian scriptural citation is spread across the chest of a man running for governor of a very diverse state.

It tells all you need to know about whose votes are important to him.

In trying to find exactly where Mastriano got his “walk as free people” slogan, I came across a June, 2021, article about a rally held to protest pandemic restrictions in Pennsylvania…masks, closings, distancing, vaccinations, the whole bit. In remarks to attendees that day, Mastriano is quoted as having said, “We need to walk as free people. You’re sovereign over your own body.”

Judging from his stance on abortion, honestly should have compelled him to add, “except when you are pregnant.”

Beware of politicians wearing their religion on their chests.

"The Americanization of the foreigner"

Herbert Quick’s 1922 novel, Vandemark’s Folly, is the first-person story of very young Jacob Vandemark’s trek from New York State to Iowa in the 1850s. Jake is an American by birth, born of Dutch parents in New York. One of the central crises occurs when he finally comes to the forty-acre plot that is to be his, only to discover that it is considered the poorest piece of potential farm land in that part of Iowa. “Hell’s Slew,” the locals call it. Soon it will be known as “Vandemark’s Folly.”

At the end of his long and arduous journey, Jake is overwhelmed by the shock of his profound disappointment at where it has brought him, and he “crie(s) like a baby.” He feels a large hand on his head, looks up, and sees the man who will be farming the land next to his. Immigrant Magnus Thorkelson comforts him with, “Forty acres bane pretty big farm in Norvay. My fadder on twenty acres, raise ten shildren. Not so gude land like dis.” Magnus offers to live and work with Jake, and he accepts the offer.

Here is how Jake concludes this chapter of his story:

A lot is said nowadays about the Americanization of the foreigner; but the only thing that will do the thing is to work with the foreigner, as I worked with Magnus—let him help me, and be active in helping him. The Americanization motto is, “Look upon the foreigner as an equal. Help him. Let him help you. Make each other’s problems mutual problems—and then he is no longer a foreigner.” When Magnus Thorkelson came back on foot across the prairie from Monterey Centre, to lay his hand on the head of that weeping boy alone on the prairie, and to offer to live with him and help him, his English was good enough for me, and to me he was as fully naturalized as if all the judges in the world had made him lift his hand while he swore to support the Constitution of the United States and of the State of Iowa. He was a good enough American for Jacobus Teunis Vandemark.

Might we make progress in resolving our persistent immigration challenges if we approached them with the openness Jacob Vandemark and Magnus Thorkelson showed to one other?

By the way, if you’d like to know more about Herbert Quick (1861-1925), there is quite a bit available on line. I posted an essay about him on this blog on February 13, 2014. I know of him because he was born in Grundy County, Iowa, where I grew up.

Between Easters

This is the week between Easter as it is celebrated in the “Western” Church and Easter as it is celebrated in the “Eastern” Church. Very broadly speaking, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism are considered Western and Orthodoxy is considered Eastern. It’s a long, long story.

Last Sunday in our church we sang “Christ is Alive” by 20th century hymn writer Brian Wren. One stanza particularly struck me when churches and nations are bitterly divided between and within themselves, and when two largely Orthodox nations, Russia and Ukraine, are engaged in a bloody war that threatens us all. I will simply quote that stanza here. Take from it whatever it gives to you…

In every insult, rift, and war

where color, scorn, or wealth divide,

(Christ) suffers still, yet loves the more,

and lives, though ever crucified.

The glass in the grass: green

This old man canes his way
upon late March’s greening grass,
neither slow nor fast,

around and over lumps in earth’s carpet,

and the mini wetlands cradled between them.

He looks up toward his goal:

the paved parking lot beyond this green expanse

that separates it from the gravel trail to its north.

Maybe a hundred yards of earth,

a shortcut through spring.

He recalls the exhilaration of his childhood’s spring,

felt for all its confidence and hope.

Now above all else he fears falling.

But he needs to be here—

this sun, this air,

these birds singing spring into being on this grass.

Now! A new green—a shiny, flashy

glint of green—spikes his eyes.

He focuses just ahead where,

in the grass, a broken shard of a bottle

—a Coke bottle, the old kind?—

hides among the blades.

He stops, examines it and its surroundings.

Experience teaches that where there’s one glass sliver

there certainly lurk two and three and more.

As there are, as he knew there would be.

He winces: behind his eyes he sees

a barefoot child (not a care in the world!)

outrun their parents into the grass

only to stab their foot upon glass

and bleed and scream…

…and, the man hopes, to be comforted by love.

Calmed.

(He does not know that child.)

What will he do? For the good of that child

he will remove the glass from the grass.

He can balance three, maybe four, pieces

between his left hand’s thumb and fingers,

make his way to the parking lot,

then cross it to the trash can framed by parked cars.

Steadied by the cane in his right hand, he bends his lanky frame,

picks up first, one piece, then two more.

He clasps them as best he can,

then steps out—so carefully—maintaining

just the right amount of pressure on the hurt he carries.

Walking these last few yards he sees still more glass

strewn randomly, as if on purpose,

here and there in the grass along his way.

A car is parked on the lot’s near side,

motor running, person sitting at the wheel.

Will they notice me and wonder what on earth I’m doing?

Why, at my age, my cane and I are doing it?

Is not this cane problem enough for me, and my years?

On the far side two figures sit inside

another car flanking the trash can,

its rap deafening them to birds’ songs.

They must see him open the trash can’s cover

and drop something small and green into it.

Look at that strange old man.

Done, should he do more?

More glass is out there. He saw it.

If he has saved the child

from the cut of the glass he’s carried away,

their foot could still land on what he left behind.

Well, he couldn’t get it all even if he were

fifty years younger a man. No sense trying.

And anyway, he needs something to carry

all these pieces in. He can make only so many trips.

His car’s trash container is lined with a plastic bag.

He yanks it out, balls it in his left fist,

and carries it back across the lot and into the grass,

where he stops to wonder where

the glass he saw not a minute ago has gone.

How foolish, this old man!

No rightly-thinking one would do this.

But he would, and is—a lesser good deed

than some he might have done in younger years, he knows.

Yet a good deed, foolish as they can be.

He finds caches of shattered Coke bottle glass

scattered all around in small piles,

even the bottle’s bottom cradles its top,

as if buried together.

This park’s mine field is no accident.

He finds what he finds without going far—

he collects enough to make him feel good about his day

walking and enjoying spring,

asking how many he has left to enjoy

before spring and he disappear in the march of change and time.

He puts his retrieved green glass into the bag

with the candy wrappers already there,

and carries it all back to and through the lot,

passing slightly amused drivers,

and lowers it to the floor beneath the seat

the passenger would sit in if he had a passenger.

He drives home, where he feels just okay about his little good deed

as he deposits the plastic bag of glass and wrappings

into the trash can in his garage.

Will this old man’s way

save a child from at least one

of the dangers of life?

No one will ever know.

As this old man will never know who

will pick up after him, or what.

Broken.

Sometimes—he reflects to himself that evening

because the glass in the grass is his secret—

sometimes all he can do is pick up shards

and hope he's found enough of them

to save another from his pain.

(Keith Dean Myers)