Sampling

On Monday when we walked the 606, Michele said how she liked “sampling” the music people on the trial were listening to.  We went from rap to R and B to Puerto Rican pop with a dash of rock.  Today, I sampled conversations.

Rather than spend close to 45 minutes driving to the South Side this morning, I settled on 20 minutes to get to the 606 and do my biking there.  What I heard was mostly young mother stuff and young people stuff and maybe a word or two in another language.  The serious types, all in trousers or dresses, talk too softly for me to hear anything as I whizz by on my Schwinn.  They’re all planning The Next Big Thig, no doubt, details and location to be announced at a later date.

I pushed it because I’m not getting any younger, and I hate making concessions to the inevitable.  Around the fifth or sixth circuit (each one 5.4 miles), I started thinking about all the bikes I’ve had.  Basically, there were three before the Schwinn, the first two of which were second-hand.  I grew up with hand-me-downs and not-new things because there were three kids—one of whom, me, generated a ton of doctor bills with his asthma—in the family and my dad didn’t make a lot of money as a Chicago fireman; this was in the years before Daley I saw the light on city salaries.  We weren’t poor, just blue collar, and by counting their pennies my parents made sure there was always enough come birthday time and Christmas.

Anyway, my dad had good taste in bikes.  The first one he spray-painted electric blue while turbocharging the pedals; I could race cars with that bike, I swear.  When I got bigger, he switched Blue Boy for a Sherman tank; it got the job done and made me feel a whole lot tougher than I was.  The third bike was a charm, new, a three-speed from Sears; this is the one I rode out to Brookfield Zoo with a friend one summer Sunday.  How we managed not to get killed on Harlem Avenue remains one of life’s great mysteries.

And number four, of course, is the Schwinn Varsity.  By the time I hit circuit nine, I was imagining the city and suburbs knit together with trails like the one I was on, elevated, zipping past homes and factories.  This has to be the future of Chicago in the 21^st century, if it’s going to have a future.  Right now, we have a billionaire governor with a billionaire pal happy to bankroll him when necessary.  We also have a billionaire governor wannabe from the other party.  How I wish these men would have Jonathan Edwards-like dreams, of being suspended by a single thread over the fiery pits of hell.  What will save them eternal damnation?  Maybe if they stop wasting their money on vanity politics and instead pool it to help construct the city of trails.  Otherwise, let the threads snap.