Lessons for the New Year

My birthday falls on November 29th at 5.03 PM. It's always been a little annoying to have a birthday that is close to Thanksgiving but can never be ON Thanksgiving. On good years the 29th falls just the right distance from Thursday - just far enough to have hungry people willing to be social again.

Let's not even talk about 1963 and the Kennedy Assassination. Now THAT'S a great way to ruin a birthday party.*

Nothing quite so dramatic this year. In fact, for some reason I felt inclined to have a party of sorts. Most years I just take the day off work and hole up somewhere or go for a ride, but not this year. I guess I'm feeling my age and wanted to have a little company.

Given the 29th fell on a Tuesday this year, I selected Sunday as the celebration day and settled on gathering at my current favorite bar. The Radio Bar is a laid back hipster watering hole with a great beer selection and some of my favorite rums. What's not to like?

So now, four days after the gathering and two days after my actual birthday, I have to go to work. I took a few additional days off to cover my birthday and provide a little buffer in case I decided to celebrate on the day of, as it were. I didn't, as it turns out, but I enjoyed having the extra time off.

I've been sort of contemplating all the changes going on lately at so many different levels from the intensely minute and personal to the utterly impersonal cosmic-sized stuff. My birthday provided a bit of focus for part of that process. Now, a few days later and about to dive back into the all too well known workday world, I considered the dangers of returning to The Rut, The Familiar, and The Sleepwalking World.

But, what to do to avoid those things? Here I was, starting a whole new year, another Trip Around the Sun, and I didn't want to fall back into the routine.

It didn't take long to discover I was getting my answer served warm and pulsing.

I had discovered my front brakes were pretty much useless the day before. This morning proved them still incapable of actually stopping me. As I rolled out I was paying particular attention to what it took to come to a stop. Unbeknownst to me, that was my first lesson - in the new year, PAY ATTENTION!

As I came around the bend from 3rd Street onto Lafayette, the first place I can see the River and the rail line that parallels it, I noticed tanker cars rolling slowly downriver. Had I missed the train whistle blowing? They usually blow the whistle pretty much constantly while passing through downtown and all the way to the southern edge of town. This morning, nothing. Not a peep. Odd, that.

It could have been a short train being sidelined for making up a larger train but, by the time I arrived at Convention Street, it was clear to me that it was a long train and picking up speed. Not quickly enough to clear the access points to the Levee Path, however, so I had to reroute myself for the trip to work. That was my second and third lessons - in the new year, BE FLEXIBLE and KNOW YOUR OPTIONS!

No Levee Path for me!

More or less quickly settling on a new route I continued on to North Boulevard to head east a bit to Saint Louis and eventually Government Street. But, no! The city was prepping for the big Holiday Spectacular at Town Square. North Boulevard was blocked.

Being on a bike the barricades didn't really deter me a great deal. The truck blocking the street did. So too the cherry picker parked on the sidewalk I headed toward to avoid the truck. Not to mention the second truck coming out of the back of the Old State Capitol arriving at the corner with the curb cut the same time I was heading into said cut.

My fourth lesson came to me as I cleared the trucks and other obstacles - in the new year, BE PERSISTENT!

I hadn't even gone two miles and I'd already been hammered with four very large, very real lessons. With a little over three miles to go I was beginning to wonder if I should turn around, call in nervous, and go back to bed.

Fortunately, nothing big happened between that point and the Student Union on campus. My last little cosmic slap on the forehead was a variation on the Wavering Pedestrian Gambit. You know the one.

Oh, look! Clouds!

You're riding along and notice a pedestrian on the sidewalk heading for the street. They are clearly going to cross and, using that amazing human capacity to work out intricate route predictions that forecast intersecting paths based on so very many different variables, you decide to do a certain thing that will most likely avoid a collision, not require slowing too much or stopping, and not scaring the walker who is most likely to simply and obliviously walk out into traffic without looking up, much less looking right and left.

But this time, just as I had made the last calculation, she looked up, looked me in the eye, blinked the way people do when they make eye contact . . . and hurried just enough to walk right into my path. Holy Shit!

I didn't have time to think, I just, somehow, took the correct evasive action without seeming to think at all. It was like my body bypassed my brain and did what needed doing. My mouth caught up before my mind and I blurted out something uncomplimentary, if brief.

My fourth lesson - in the new year, BE THANKFUL FOR YOUR SKILLS, trust them, build them, find ways to expand them.

The rest of my workday went well. Lunch at The Bicycle Shop is almost always a welcome respite from work. Not so much that it isn't work but that it isn't AT work or around work people. It represents my other life. Actually, it IS my other life. The part of my life that adds rather than subtracts. In this case, it also allowed me to get my brakes fixed while I enjoyed a little food and the companionship of the Bike Shops Boyz.

I left work well after dark but not too much after sundown. The moon was new on the 29th, my birthday (you may remember from way back there at the beginning of this thing), and I was hoping to see it return (the moon, not my birthday . . . well . . . alright, you get my drift).

See? There WAS a birthday cake!

It had been a bit cloudy late in the day and I was concerned the clouds would block my view of the moon. As I approached the Vet Med Trailhead I could see the Fingernail Moon, the finest of crescents, being alternately revealed and hidden by clouds.

What REALLY got my attention was something much more terrestrial - a petrochemical plant flare. I'd been seeing a flare on and off for weeks way off on the horizon downstream. This flare was a whole lot closer, so close I thought it was on campus but there is no plant that close. Maybe there is a well that close and it was having a problem. I don't know where it was exactly but it's forty foot flame, all orange-yellow dancing in the breeze, lit the sky.

I rode a little downstream from the trailhead to get past the lights ringing the parking area. I wanted to get past their glare a bit so I could better use my binoculars to see the flare, the moon, and the ships in the dark, dark River.

The Moon, still doing the cloud striptease thing, was gorgeous through the lenses. The flare was that much more intense, bright and flowing. Ships, moored mid-river, black against black, their lights like Orion's Belt all too terrestrial.

There was a push boat behind a barge facing upriver, immobile near the bank, with its lights trained on the barge covers. I watched another barge, outboard of the moored one, being backed downriver, it's push boat somehow holding it back and pulling it along to maintain steerage in the current, in the dark, no moon to speak of, no lights trained on the river. It was beautiful, as dark as the water it rode on, movement as fluid as the flame on the other side of the Levee.

I have to say, buying those binoculars was a really good thing.

Flowy accidental image thing.

*Yes, I know, how tacky to bring that up. But, as a nine year old about to turn ten, it really was a huge disappointment. It was also the first time I'd ever seen my father cry. The second and last time I saw him cry was not quite four years later when his wife (my mother) was killed.