bicycle kerry i spent too long outside on my bicycle today. wishing i was at home, warming my hands... my fingers were burning and red and prickly. i started to forget they were there. i was riding through the dark on the loneliest street ever, the one that is usually clogged and congested, now it is empty and vacant it's just me with my squeaky bicycle and squealing brakes and my throbbing fingers 021226 ... raze i went on riding it long after time made it too small for me. even when straddling the childhood relic only caused me pain. i wanted everything to move faster. i never thought i'd get my wish. he let me try his bike once so i could feel what it was to sit on something built for someone my size. comfortable as it was, i missed the ache of knowing i'd outgrown the vehicle tasked with carrying the burden of my body. 230220 ... ovenbird Whatever this parking lot once backed onto is gone. Maybe a playground, or a skateboard park. Now there’s a patch of weeds and cracked concrete. My father and I stand beside a decommissioned Bell phone booth held together with moss and ivy. We aren’t waiting for anyone, but two women pull up on bicycles. I recognize one as a friend from childhood I haven’t seen in over thirty years. The other woman is her younger sister and she’s riding a white cruiser with tassels hanging from the handlebars. “Still riding that old Schwinn!” my father proclaims, and she smiles a little, remembering the way he once fixed it up for her. She should, by all accounts, be too big for the bike now, but rules don’t apply here. In this lost place childhood is a thing you bring with you, not just in memory but as a physical reality that continues to exist alongside you as you age. It is attached to objects, like the arctic white bicycle with its leather seat and gleaming fenders. But these objects are not magic. They don’t protect you from adulthood’s inevitable repercussions. The girls have fallen on hard times. Their mother died recently. They’re living in an old coach house that they’re trying to restore so they can make money giving historic tours. When they cycle away my father and I are left standing in the dust of the parking lot. I realize that I have no talisman to connect me to my own childhood. I must have lost it somewhere. The telephone receiver hangs limp and dead inside the phone booth. I think about speaking into it anyway, just to see what wisp of wind speaks back. But I don’t. There is no message in any of this. Just a sense that I’ve misplaced something that could have set me on a different path, if only I’d taken better care of it. If only I’d known not to throw it away. 261012 what's it to you? who go blather from