A Christmas Crunch?

Fourteen years ago, I had a recumbent bike. I had it a few days and was getting my sea legs on a Sunday, getting the feel of the thing.

It was lousy on hills but on a straightaway, I could fly. I decided to ride it to work starting Monday and I had a rack behind me that I could strap my guitar on so I could teach music at the city college in Fresno.

If you know the recumbent bike, it’s like sitting in a chair and kicking the pedals out in front, like where your feet would be on an ottoman and the college would be a nice ride of twenty miles round trip.

The thing, before you get used to it, is nothing like a mountain or road bike and I was a cyclist. Mostly, I rode in the Sierras riding screaming downhill with shocks, helmet, and quick reactions — I only fell once and cracked a rib.

I’m riding around in what I called Reaganville. It’s the northeast part of Fresno and it always wanted to remove itself from Fresno and offered plans, every ten years or so, to cede from the city proper because it wasn’t white enough.

Married with a young son, we moved up there for the school district and the “sprayed with Lysol, if you aren’t white, you act white” pastiche.

I know how to take corners on a road or mountain bicycle, but I found out in an instant that my sea legs weren’t developed for this weird center of gravity two-wheeled living room chair type conveyance and I went down to the pavement in a heartbeat, turning at the corner of a street with a slick over-watered neighborhood low spot where the water collected and kind of made a pond with algae already formed.

Your butt is inches above the pavement so I went straight on the hard pavement on my right leg and spiral fractured it from below the knee all the way through the ankle shattering it.

I was in the street, holding up my leg with my foot in a strange direction. People are seeing me there and Fresno is a Christian community so cars were passing me by, not stopping to help but looking quite nice in their church clothes on leather seats in Mercedes and so forth. One car’s passenger waved at me since they lived down the street.

In about five minutes a Jewish couple on a walk stopped and dialed my wife for me. She and my son came and scooped me up and delivered me to the hospital.

Today is the day of Christmas Eve and I’m up early to take my ten-mile hike. I can do it in an hour and a half. I go through mountain neighborhoods so I see people with tight faces, rushing to get something to repair a relationship. Some person has found out that someone they really don’t like has bought them a present! Oh, sheet! They’d probably written this person off during the summer because they found out this person was an atheist or a liberal Christian. Around here, Christianity can be pretty brutal with Jesus the Republican telling you to watch FOX “news” and listen to the Limbaugh guy which I actually had coffee with in a dream last night — I really did!

For a few Sundays, I attended an Episcopal Church — they split from the Anglican Church because of a gay minister in the middle eighties, I think it was.

They have a woman priest and are welcoming and soon found out they can’t touch me because I know too much but they understand that I am a liberal man and will stand with all good people who are committed to social justice.

I am a friend with the Emerson Institute and their Positive Living Center and they are friends with the Methodists and Catholics because they are generally liberal. The Emerson Institute lets me be the transcendentalism expert and I speak endlessly with their founder. He says, “basically, we’re atheists because we are not going with the God thing but the universal and mindless energies; the universe doesn’t provide a personal god but it does affirm love and fear. Choose the one you want to be amplified.”

This is Christmas and I do believe in Hannaka Harvey, the anti — Claus. He comes through the basement and steals stuff so I had to get home to guard my computer and guitar.