So many bike rides until lately, when I have found myself catching rides and borrowing the car. I have long understood that my ability to commute by bike and bus is possible because my work schedule is flexible and I don’t currently care for anyone who needs me to pick them up somewhere. I spend two and half to three hours a day commuting when I go to campus. And now it’s Fall 2023, and my work life is much busier than it has been, and it’s either grab a ride with Susan or get home after dinner. I’ll take the ride. (Thanks, Susan!)

I type this not to apologize for not writing on my blog, or for not riding my bike. All of this stuff is entirely up to me. But in my therapy appointment today I talked about the frustration I feel about not getting to explore on my bike as much as I usually get to explore, so after our appointment I headed out to enjoy the cool air and the cloudy sky.

I headed over to the Rotunda to run an errand and then headed down the hill and over and up into Druid Hill Park. I did my half circle around and back, up past the basketball courts, a right and a left at Safety City. I did the turn around the gazebo and up to the tennis courts and Pool #2. They are redoing a bunch of those courts, and I hope at least a couple are for pickleball. I have my own net, but having to lug it around and set it up means I don’t play pickleball, and I’d like to play pickleball. Folks were pickleballing on the regular tennis courts, but I’m a purist.

I rode up past the cemetery, a left, a how-you-doin’ to a guy smoking a blunt while leaning against his car, and then I zipped around the circle, ending up back where I started, doing another trip around the half circle. I stopped to snap this picture of the overwhelming sky and the fence, tantalizingly open. I want this circle back so badly. I want to just go around and around, no worry about cars or hills or intersections.

And then I headed back down the hill and home. I passed the new Johns Hopkins buildings they’re putting in across the street from the day care center. One of them has its glass on it. Signs promise they’ll be spreading global democracy from here. I have a visceral reaction to that–spreading democracy has too often been another way to say “invasion and occupation.” I thought about that, about the ease with which so many of us forget history, imagine that the violence started just today, that it doesn’t have its own roots in a daily violence we don’t see only because we are lucky. Pedal, pedal, pedal, back home, happy to be back on my bike and back on my words.