I Miss My Bike

In my childhood, I rode bikes to play. It was fun! It was good exercise! My friends were all doing it. But that’s all I thought bikes were about. Fun. Turns out I was dead wrong.

When I moved to Japan, suddenly my bike was my main mode of transportation around town. (For out-of-town excursions there was my beloved, truly wonderful train system. I’m still waiting for America to catch up.) Of course I never my bike anywhere more than an hour away. It didn’t have gears and it had a basket on the front. It was what they called a “mama-chari,” more suitable for old ladies than for the Lance Armstrongs among us. But I loved it.

It took me to work and back every day, to my favorite park for hiking, to the beach when I needed a change of pace, and perhaps most importantly, to the grocery store. I am not a big shopper, but grocery stores are the one place that I can really blow a wad. I love food, and I love cooking. I could walk through a mall and not spend a penny [except at the food court] but I cannot walk out of a grocery store empty-handed. Lucky for me, my bike gave me the perfect excuse for portion control.

Granted, the first few times I shopped I was still in my US mentality… fill up a cart full of groceries and throw them in the car. That made for some interesting rides home. With my bike basket overflowing and a couple of extra bags hanging on each handlebar, it was harder to control where I was going. I came to admire more than ever the Africans that I used to see riding their bikes up and down mountains, loaded down with a hundred pounds of charcoal, bananas, etc. It was even more unbelievable to me when I later visited Vietnam and saw entire families sharing a bike. I will never begin to match them. But once I got used to the carrying capacity, I came to really enjoy the limitations of my bike, and of the hand-held grocery basket that I carried with me up and down the aisles. Furthermore, the ride to the store and back helped me feel better about the meals and snacks that I was carrying home. Now that I am back in Hardin County, I desperately miss those bike rides to the store. And I have some extra pounds that prove it.