Picture of the Year

The girls are back in school, leaves are coming down, much of the flower garden looks ready to be put to bed, we're looking forward to a harder winter than last year and road salt ten dollars a ton higher. My mind is looking forward to the end of the year, and looking back for a picture of 2014 to post on my side bar.

I realize I don't have that picture. If I did, it would be Carly and me. But, I don't. Carly is my personal trainer, who looked at me and the black eye and the cane last February and informed me I simply needed my core back and she would see to that.

I've taken some pictures over the year, but not of the studio, or the twice weekly sessions. I started with one pound weights. Carly called them pacifiers. That's what she called my cane, too. It lives in my car now, and I do twenty five reps of whatever I'm doing with an eight pound weight in each hand.

We've met most of her goals, except for riding bicycles down the towpath trail. My head is still not ready. "Hmpfh," she snorts. "We will be riding next spring." I'm sure she's right.

If a picture of two old women shows up, and one of them is fit as a fiddle and the other is me, that will be the picture. In the meantime, here are some pictures I've taken since last February.

Carly's studio is on the left end of the building, the windows at the very top. The rest is apartments, businesses, and a luxury residential suite on the right. It was the apartment of the man who bought up much of Peninsula to save it from development and zoned it into a kind of Brigadoon while he was alive. His foundation rents the apartment as a sort of get away to people who can afford it.

The first fifteen steps. Plus two not photographed.

The spruce up there on the right is lovely to smell on the way by.

Seventeen steps to the first landing.

An elevator. But, you must find Artie, the building manager,

to activate it in the basement.

And the elevator stops at the top of the first flight.

There are still sixteen more stairs to the studio.

I've never taken the elevator.

Looking up at the ceiling and skylights from this staircase.

Looking down at someone's door.

That will be me tomorrow afternoon,

Climbing fifty stairs, 

Water bottle and gym shoes over my shoulder,

because Carly is determined we will ride bikes come spring.

My best bike

I learned to ride aged eight, on a full size Schwinn with balloon tires and coaster brakes. That bike went on down to my sister and is in my daughter’s garage now, waiting restoration. A wonderful bike, but not the first that comes to mind.

My best bike ever was a folding bike, French, as I recall. Bright yellow. I acquired it as a bank promotion back in the seventies. Banks were giving away the shop, or the bank, as the case may be, back then.  Banks were paying all kinds of interest to have your money, and offering all kinds of promotions to get it.  For some banking transaction I scored the little yellow bike.

It went on vacations and was handy to ride over to the playground to get the kids home for supper. It was critical around the neighborhood, tracking down which house over a four square block area two girls might be.

I remember the girls and me, riding the back roads from Mentor to Willoughby, to buy ice cream cones on a hot summer night. These were quite the olden days; we rode facing the traffic. Another trip was to a little city park in Willoughby, with a tall bluff overlooking Lake Erie. I’ll bet these were ten mile round trips.

Fortunately, nothing ever went wrong with the little yellow bike, or I would have been in big trouble. The wheels kept on rolling, the brakes kept on stopping. The only maintenance issue was air in the tires, resolved by a trip to the air pumps at a gas station.

Except—one pedal began flying off, gratuitously. A sharp left and the left hand pedal would fly off the left hand peg. I’d pick it up, throw it in the basket, and back home snap it back behind the flange thingy that held it in place. I never saw the difference between the right and the left that kept the right in place, but sent the left pedal flying on a banking left turn.

One night I made the sharp turn into Whitney White’s drive. The pedal flew, I coasted over, retrieved it, told the girls it was time to come home. Whitney’s dad jumped up from his lawn chair on the drive. “I can put that back on for you.”

“It’s OK,” I answered. “I can do it.”

“No, let me,” said Whitney’s dad, one stride later.

Whitney’s mom grabbed the back of his shirt. “She said she can do it!” Whitney’s dad sat back down.

I wish I could remember what I did with that bike.

 Borrowed shamelessly from Wickipedia

Bicycle update

Jan tells me bicycle story corrections are required.  Her brothers taught her to ride in circles on the blacktop.  She crashed into the garage twice and then got it.  Her narrow squeak between the grape vines and the uprights was result of being six and only learning mechanics.  She came down Gardendale behind her brother on his ten speed.  Mel idly amused himself pedaling backwards, which didn’t affect his bicycle.  She thought he was pedaling forward, and not to be outdone, redoubled her effort.  Down the hill.    She was totally out of control at the bottom and grateful for the relatively soft landing.

Mel wasn’t so fortunate when he crashed.  Excess speed was not a factor.   He came down the hill under reasonable control.  At the bottom his wheel broke, the bike went forward, the forks embedded in the ground and he went over the handlebars.  Chico’s mother, a nurse, saw the accident from her kitchen window and called for the ambulance before she went outside.  He spent at least one night in the hospital, being assessed and treated for a concussion.  As serious as the time he got a buttocks full of shrapnel.  Always up for adventures, Mel was.

Bicycles

CUV’s—childhood utility vehicles.  We rode them far and wide.  Places we should be, places we shouldn’t.  I was eight when the mystery of the box behind the chair in the basement was revealed on my birthday. My mom told me she got her first bike at age 18; she was employed and bought it herself.  I have no idea where she rode it.  We rode ours everywhere. 

I don’t remember the actual presentation of my Schwinn.  My ever practical parents may have sent me to the garage to discover it.  That’s where we kept them; dad built a bike rack.  In the summer the almost nightly question, “Did you put your bike away?” could result in “Um, no, I’ll go do it,” and a hasty trip up the street to retrieve the bike from behind some garage.

I totally recall learning to ride my bike.  It probably was the very day.  It was cold, I had on a sweater.  Mom and I set out from our front drive; Moraine was level, as opposed to Gardendale going up hill.  Our residential street was not paved by the city during my tenure.  There was some squabble with the city as to the streets’ status.  Akron claimed it was a private road and they didn’t even plow it.  Consequently the potholes deterred any attempt at speed by an automobile and kids on bikes ruled the road.  After they learned how to navigate the holes and ruts.

Mom held the rear end of the bike in the time honored fashion and I wobbled past my house, past the neighbor’s house, past the vacant lot.   I wobbled right and turned into the drive of our next neighbor.  The drive went uphill, I pedaled hard.  I wobbled right again and was on the path through the vacant lot.  The bike picked up speed, I was not in control.  The wind was in my face, my head buzzed, my vision blurred.  I heard Mom saying “You’re doing fine,” and saw her down on the road.  I realized she had let go long ago.  I realized I was a bike rider!

In retrospect, although we rode our bikes everywhere, we never rode them to school.  I don’t know if we suggested and were denied, or if riding to school was just not done.  There was a bike rack at our elementary school, but it only held bikes after school and during the summer, when we went to play on the equipment.  I also remember we were older than grade school when we did that.  It was half a mile to our grade school, a mile to the high school and 1.999 miles to junior high.  The statute specified a two mile distance to require a bus; there were no school buses in Akron when I was a kid.  Bicycles on those busy streets would have been deadly.  We jaywalked Tallmadge Avenue as it was, to avoid a block to the light and a block back to the school.

The grade on Gardendale was serious.  In the winter cars that came out of drives part way up the hill generally went down first, turned around on our blacktop and got a running start.  A serious hill that requiring serious attention.  I was a cautious kid; I used brakes on that hill.  My brother Mel pre learned his motor cycle skills on that hill, even knocking himself unconscious in one misjudgment of gravel, turning radius and speed.  My poor little sister was sent up the hill at six or seven years of age by two big brothers who failed to give adequate advice.  She came flying down, made the turn onto the blacktop, went straight through the grape arbor and crashed in the garden.  Walt was heartsick.  Mel probably thought it was good training.