My Poor Baby

The more I get to know Bayan the more I love her. We went to the park this morning, and enjoyed an idyllic ride on the (mostly) flat stretch of road. And then we turned across the dam to face my enemy together for the first time.

The Hill.

The Hill looks harmless. Hills usually do. But The Hill is crooked, so it looks soft and gentle and then you turn and all there is in front of you is more stinking hill. I've gone up The Hill on Old Busted. The bike came to a grumbling stop about fifteen feet from the top, and I had to fight my way the rest of the way up. Old Busted doesn't like hills. At all.

Bayan mocks hills. She laughs at them until they droop in shame. She doesn't walk up hills- she dances up them. She chews them up and spits them out and jumps up and down on them.

I don't dance up hills. I wheeze and puff and wonder if I'm about to have an asthma attack. But Bayan is a nice bike to have on hills, and someday I'll be able to dance up with her. (Clarification: I never got off the bike. I never felt like I had to, or was about to have to. I just wasn't dancing.)

But then tragedy struck (and it didn't even strike on The Hill; life has no sense of appropriate setting).

I took a wide turn, wobbled (have I mentioned that I'm an inexperienced cyclist? it would be hard to find someone who knows less about what they're doing than I do), went off the road, tried to get back on the road because Bayan is a road bike and I was given dire warnings about what would happen to her offroad, but nothing very bad happened because at that point I fell over. Happily, I was next to a nice paved road and landed on some nice soft pavement. Bayan mostly fell on me, and I'm softer than the road, so that's good.

I scrapped my palms and my elbows but other than that (and the embarrassment) I'm fine. But Bayan's chain popped out of the gear or whatever it is, so she's temporarily out of commission. If I knew anything about bikes I could probably fix this in ten minutes. I don't know anything about bikes. The Principal knows about bikes, so I'll ask him to fix it.

And the next time we go to the library, we're getting books on bike maintenance and repair. I need to know how to take care of Bayan.