I love to make Kay laugh. When she laughs, all’s right with the world. Kay has what I call the pratfall sense of humor. She can watch a collection of videos where people fall on their bums, and her amusement ascends with each humiliating scenario. Her face turns red, the tears rolling down her cheeks, building and building until one expects a lung to be expelled. One story of my humiliation (volumes could be written), has brought her much enjoyment in the countless retelling. I share it with you now in two parts, a serial trend I am establishing for a few future stories.
Once we moved to Kay’s family home, I purchased a mountain bike, and on most days except for snow or lightening, I rode a ten-mile loop from my driveway and back through the countryside. The surface streets were a nice mixture of steep hills and straight stretches. It was not an ironman training route, but for thirty-five minutes, it doubled my heart rate. On the back half of the loop there was a long stretch of road where I could really get up some speed, and I would try to go as long as I could without touching the handlebars, leaning back, arms outstretched, creating the sensation of flying. I always rode early in the morning when traffic was light.
The Fourth of July 2001 was a day filled with heat and sunshine. We planned to spend that 4th as we had done for years: attending the Whitland Avenue block-party celebration with thousands of other people singing patriotic music and listening to my father recite a portion of the Declaration of Independence with his powerful dramatic voice. But before that event, as always, I rode my ten-mile route.
When I hit the flat stretch of road and had built up sufficient speed, I released my hands from the handlebars. It was not long before I heard the snap of metal. The pin that held the seat inside the bike frame had broken. My world shifted into slow motion as my life passed before my eyes. The seat dropped then tilted back and I began to slide backwards. My survival instincts were in overdrive as I desperately reached for the handlebars.
My mountain bike had those stubby tires, and for what was about to happen, they were akin to a high-powered saw blade that cuts through a giant log. The trajectory of my bottom was headed straight for the rear tire…yes, pun intended. My reflexive buttock reaction as the spinning tire made its way into my posterior was to clamp down like a set of brake pads. This caused the bike to stop abruptly hurling me forward into the metal rod that once held the seat resulting in anterior damage. I was dumped onto the road, landing, yes, on my bottom. While sitting in the road assessing the bodily damage, I heard a vehicle approach from behind. I had survived the worst bike crash of my life only to be run over by a car. (To be continued)
