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The Old Ones Just Keep Going

On a day of celebration, we decided to just keep riding

On the day the election is called we mount our bikes and climb the hill near what used to be my mother‘s Flatbush apartment. The hill seems endless but today I am also endless. I stand and push, suddenly aware of how much power lives stored in the thickness of my thighs. Power enough to defy gravity, power enough to propel myself through the morass of time. The hill seems to go on forever. My breath is short but longer than it used to be. It has been nearly three weeks since I quit smoking for probably the 75th time in my adulthood. This quitting felt different: I had a birthday, I’m talking about it in therapy, I’ve noticed an overall drop off in self-destructive impulses, my mother died of this very thing. All of these factors make me feel like this quitting is different. But then again I often have the feeling that “this quitting is different.” The last 74 or so times, it has not been.

Nevertheless….

I am biking around a Brooklyn that is celebrating an election win, or maybe more accurately, they are celebrating an election loss. They are celebrating a vote count suggesting that there are more American voters who don’t want an obviously cruel racist authoritarian in the White House than do. A low bar, but a bar nonetheless. It is nice, the dancing and horn honking and firework setting, the public parties, DJ’s in the streets, spontaneous chants. It is nice the woman…