A double dose of green for today
It’s hard, in the middle of a large city, to imagine simpler times, when the automobile didn’t require as much of the “living space” as the humans it serves. Of course, the occasional city bus reminds us that there are alternatives that are less consuming, but on the whole, we live in a world of metallic monsters with an enormous appetite.
The bicycle would serve us more often if winter didn’t carry on for more than two hundred days straight. That’s why the return of warm temperature and ice-free roads sent son #1 and I on a precipitous voyage to a used bicycle store down the hill from here. We used a car to go there, but the goal is admirable. Reduce the number of trips made by taxi-Mom and taxi-Dad during the next few months.
Son #1 has a love-hate relationship with bikes. He loves them, but they break down. And, fixing a bike is not a genetically acquired skill set. Believe me. So this is not the first or third time we’ve bought a bike that will do its best to be serviceable, in the face of a lack of servicing. Still, a bicycle is green.
And so is purchasing from a store that exists to repair and transfer bikes at reasonable cost, while serving as a point of reinsertion to the workforce for young people. I’d seen the building while on the way to work in my trusty bus, and this was a “first visit”. A good impression: rows of reworked two wheel masterpieces, a crowd of potential buyers, several young people with tattoos, piercings and a will to do their job. In fact, I’m changing the order of that last phrase; make it several young people with a will to do their job, with piercings and tattoos to bear witness to their individuality. There, that’s better.
So, for $80 we’ve returned home with a reasonable bicycle. I still think the industry has over-complicated things; we don’t need eighteen gear ratios to navigate the city, but that’s industry. I also added a small bell for my own bike. Apparently the police have a special ticket worth lots of cash for the offense of “failure to carry a sounding device” and the defense of a loud yell doesn’t carry much weight in the lottery. Conformity isn’t always evil.
Only time will tell if this particular purchase will suffer the slings and arrows of bad roads, thieves and broken glass, but I’ve taken a double dose of green for today.
