All Trike All the Time

• I was talking in the dark over a bike rack after a good poetry reading fraught with mortality: Jack Gilbert, who I believe beatgoddess knows, and who was announced at the reading Northampton's next poet laureate -- I just read his new book, Refusing Heaven, and loved it
; and Linda Gregg, whose work I liked when I heard it as well, and who, we all learned, had gotten involved with Jack Gilbert in 1962 in San Francisco when she was 19 and his book was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize (William Carlos Williams, who was dead, wrote the book that won). They are divorced and were quite affectionate. She said that she was grateful they were both alive. She said, "It could easily be otherwise, believe me." I believed her.

So, I was talking about the reading with my friend Janet Aalfs, who is the current poet laureate, over the bike rack, in the dark, just outside the door. I had, in fact, been cruising around town for some hours on my trike, waiting for the reading to start. Someone came up to the bike rack to park and handed me a little slip of paper, saying: "This is for people with bikes." I felt chosen, and dropped into my bag.

I rode across the campus while Janet, who has long legs, walked, and we stopped to talk again in the driveway where Meg, a young woman who studied martial arts with Janet, was recently killed on her bike. There are cards and flowers, a bike painted white, and a red flasher stuck to the bark of a tree, all covered with lots of leaves. Janet rather gently but also rather firmly pushed my trike off the asphalt when a car pulled out, and we spoke a little about Meg, before I rode home on the sidewalk in the cool, unseasonable dark.

The next morning, I read the slip of paper. It was a call for submissions for a zine called Bike Love! Just what I was in the mood for. I whipped out a tribute to my trike and sent it to resisting@riseup.net (with Bike Love in the subject line -- you could, too, if you love a bike) right away.


• Today, I was standing next to my trike waiting to cross Route 9, when coming towards me from town, I saw a person on another trike. My first sighting! I moved so I wasn't blocking his way, and when he drew up beside me, a man with a long gray beard and a cane in the back stopped to say, "If I didn't know better, I'd say you had stolen my bike."
  
  It was true. Our trikes were identical, except that his had an extra basket on the front. He said that he had taken it off his walker and put it on. He had an air horn it, which he said keeps dogs away who might bite. He said he used to ride a motorcycle with a sidecar, but that he has Lou Gehrig's disease, and doesn't now. He told me that you can get a motor for a trike that'll go 20 miles per hour on flat surfaces and up to 12 on hills. When he asked me how much I paid for mine, I said it was a present, and he said, "You must have a rich boyfriend."