What good does an old bike do

For the first time ever, I just bought a bike.

Sure, I got a bright orange bike for my 13th birthday, but that doesn’t really count. It was an awkward half-kid, half-adult brute, although 8th graders deserve little better. Every other bike that I’ve owned has been a parental hand-me-down. The latest, two-wheeling the last few years of law school in Madison, was my mom’s 1960s gitan. About three parts on it worked after all these years. Two wheels and one brake.

Kickball league with the law ladies is a difficult distance away. It’s walkable, but it takes 12 phone calls on the return trip to get from the park home, just a bit longer than my attention span. There’s no subway between here and there, so I turned to the bus system. It shaved a few minutes off, but wasn’t too reliable, and cost $3 bucks a round. So I set out, as I tend to do when I set out, to look on Craigslist.

Turns out Craigslist is good for a ride. I found ‘er on my first try. $50, all mine. I had to ride out to Silver Spring, Maryland to take a look at the White Whisper, but I bought her on the spot. I rode 15 miles down the Rock Creek Parkway, smiling the whole way, to get her back home. She’s got a bit of a squeak, but she rolls just fine on nearly bald tires.

Finally, it felt like summer. A new way to transport and recreate. But turns out its good for more than that. As I was locking (new kryptonite u-lock? $55.) her up after one kickball game (a loss), a saw an unfamiliar face, opening the upstairs door, eyeing my bike enviously. We took to chatting, and he admitted he’d considered Craigslisting a bike, too, during his two weeks in DC to visit his wife, my upstairs neighbor. I offered my key, with a warning that I didn’t have a helmet yet, but he gladly accepted the offer.

The next day, he came back down to my seldom-used door and invited me to dinner, to join his wife and him Saturday. I was quick to accept.

Five and a half hours later, I was aglow with the warmth of meeting new interesting people. They’d invited another couple – I was the fifth wheel – and way enjoyed bottle after bottle of wine and topic after topic of conversation. A Fiji-raised Indian. A Trinidad-born P.O.I. American. A Vietnamese-American. A small town Illinois girl. And me, content to be labeled "interesting...really really good type of interesting." As diplomaticesque an evening as can be, practice of sorts for evenings ahead.

I smiled all evening long. I particularly liked one moment in time, late in the evening, smiling to be surrounded by two contented couples. Both ladies, sundressed and barefooted, had kicked their barefeet onto their respective manfolk’s lap. Laying a claim of peaceful ownership, comfortable in the contentment of belly and self and another, just enough subtle contact to heighten the savoring of a conversation and an evening delightful.