By Jim Hagarty
2006
I never thought this would happen, I guess, but as I grow older, though I try to keep up, I’m feeling more and more like a stranger in a world that’s subtly changing before my eyes. Maybe this is a natural preparation for the day when I won’t be part of the world at all.
Nothing brings this home to me more than the modern bicycle, and even more powerfully, the modern bicyclist, about whom I have commented before. I am at a loss to know why today’s bicycle manufacturers go to the trouble and expense of including handlebars on their vehicles as they seem about as necessary these days as you know what on a bull. Male riders, especially, like to trundle on down the sidewalks of our fair city, with their hands on their hips or, on colder days, in their pockets. I guess I can see why they would want to do this beyond the looking cool factor but I just don’t understand how they do it.
In my day, it seems to me it practically took a circus acrobat to ride “look ma, no hands!” on an ordinary bicycle. I haven’t done a lot of research on this, or even any, but I’m guessing it was harder to ride a bike with your hands in your pockets 50 years ago because the country roads where I lived were all gravel. Hit a stone the wrong way and you’d be doing a face plant at 20 miles an hour.
I also wonder whether or not the big, fat, wide wheels and tires on a lot of bikes today are better at keeping them upright with no guidance on their handlebars than the rounded tires on our bikes did when I was a kid.
I was 31 when I got my first new bike. I bought it at a place called the Bicycle Hospedal, appropriately named because the thing was so anorexic it looked as though it could have benefitted from some intravenous feeding. It was a “racing bike” and it cost $212. (I forget dates, names, appointments, but I never forget what “major” purchases cost me).
I had to contort myself into a pretzel to ride the blasted thing as the turned-down handlebars were located somewhere just above the front axle. Pretty much the only thing I could see while riding it was the pavement, though if I cranked my neck back at an almost inhuman angle, I might be able to see the bumpers of the cars ahead of me or even, sometimes, the horizon.
The tires on my skinny, little bike weren’t much more than glorified rubber bands with a breath of air pumped in them and every small bump in the road reverberated up into my spine like an electric shock treatment administered from the wrong end of the body. And, of course, sitting on the seat of this thing was like planting my tender rear on a hard, tiny door knob and riding that down the bumpy thoroughfares.
So, you can see why I just can’t understand how all these no-hands riders are doing it, because I sure couldn’t, and can’t.
Perhaps you are getting the picture that I didn’t like my new bike very well, and you’d be right. Years later, after tripping over it in the shed 600 times, I decided to cut my losses, took it to an auction barn and came home with a tidy $7 in my pocket. This year, I replaced it with a used “touring” bike, the type of velocipede (as a humour writer I know likes to call it) I should have been on in the first place.
All of this blather is a prelude to what I am now going to share. The other day I saw a teenager riding his bike down the street with, of course, no part of his anatomy touching his handlebars. Nothing new. What was new, for me, in any case, was the fact that he was playing some sort of hand-held game player – whether Game Boy, PSP or whatever, I could not tell as he rode along the sidewalk on the busiest street in town.
This bizarre display also goes to another of my pet peeves: multitasking. What’s next? Watching TV while biking down the street, doing your homework on a laptop, emailing Mom, photographing the people being passed, including the grumpy, old guy scratching his head at a sight he thought he’d never see?
