Breather

If yesterday was Monday, that must mean I was hitting a bike trail, the 606 to be exact.  It was close to 90 degrees again, but a breeze off the lake kept things bearable and helped me realize yet another thing I like about the trail.

It’s 2.7 miles long end to end, from Lawndale to Ashland.  Chicago being Chicago, a city built on a grid, that basically means you’re travelling 27 blocks, with street names.  For me, the neat part is that I grew up with the great majority of these names—Sawyer, Whipple, California, Damen…They may not mean anything to you, but for me they’re a portal to time travel.

I set out to do fifty miles and didn’t stop until I hit forty.  I don’t recommend this; it just works for me.  The trail, though by and large a straight line, curves and dips in a way that I can only say makes biking easy, which makes it fun as well.  So, once I was sufficiently covered in sweat and dipped out, I pulled over to a grassy area that overlooks St. Louis Avenue, a street I once passed pretty much every for a couple of decades of my life.  I found some shade, parked my back against a fence, drank some water and commenced time travel.

The sky was half-cloud, half-blue, perfect for reminiscing.  It was 2016 and 1964 and that day in 1995 when I bought the wiffle-ball-and-bat set for Clare.  I called my daughter to challenge her to a race on the 606, a dare I knew she couldn’t take me up as she’s working at Northwestern University right now.  I can remember all those days we raced one another in the backyard and the stairs at the library and…

It was time to get back on the bike and finish the fifty before my legs decided it was time to call it a day.