T-shirt Ride.

I started T-shirt Ride a month ago, then lost track of the purpose of the story. Time has been difficult to stay on top of, let alone stay ahead of. When I revisited the story in preparation to posting it struck me; T-shirt Ride is a Thanksgiving story.

Six weeks ago I had shoulder surgery. Today I saw my surgeon and asked him two questions. To the first question he offered the best news; yes, I could pick Strongland up with my good arm. To the second question, could I ride my bike, no. No was his answer. Absolutely no. I understood why. After the surgery to repair a torn-bicep, frayed rotator-cuff, chipped and worn shoulder socket from arthritis and a million miles on my bike, my surgeon told my wife that the inside of my shoulder looked like cobwebs.

  The past six weeks I started packing on weight. I was suffocating in the weight but it was more than just that. There is another weight on me. My mom is in her hospital bed, her legs won't work right. I was suffocating in that too. My shoulder hurts like hell, but at least I can use it. At least I am free. Someday I won't be. Someday my legs won't work. Today they do, so I pulled on a T-shirt and got ready to ride. I am like that. Stubborn. It's cost me, that stubbornness. But sometimes, it's all I feel like I have.

  When I announced to my wife I was going to ride on the road she looked at me like I was bat-shit crazy. Five minutes later she pumped my tires because I couldn't put enough pressure on the pump handle. Before I left, she asked if I was wearing the T-shirt because I felt fat. Nope, I told her. I feel like just going for a ride. Truth was, there were two truths; I was feeling everything, all that weight on mr, and there was that other part... I just wanted to ride.

  Twenty minutes into the ride I was bawling. Snot and tears streamed off my nose, splotching the faded Miami shirt as it rippled at the snagging wind. The tears broke when I caught the shadow of a butterfly play across the pale cement in front of me. I learned from the Pojoaque Native American tribe when I worked for their suicide prevention program that the butterfly is a symbol of the transition from the spiritual world to the physical world, and the physical birth, to death. This one shadow broke me as I lost it to the reaching shadows from the tunnel of branches I rode underneath. I was overcome by imagery of my Mom lying alone in her hospital bed and my first born less than a month from being two years old. Time compacted and compressed in the flints of sharp sunlight crossing my path. Life races by you in the shadows and light and you can never equal its pace.

  Riding the bike is a constant through my life. A method of two wheeled grace provided by my parents that offered transformation as I shifted through periods of life that brought me closer or increased the distance between myself and my family.

  I don't remember every single bike they bought me but I can get close. My first bike was blue, my second bike was a red one. It was the third bike that flipped the switch on. A light blue Concorde Deluxe 12 road bike with down-tube shifters and black vinyl handlebar tape. From my first cautious rides from my house to the Ohio/Indiana state line about tenbmiles away to rides I kept increasing the distance and the sensation of freedom. That was the bike that I brought to summer camp in Northern Ohio when I was probably 13. The very first day of the week-long bike tour my big bags came undone, spilling everything I packed along the road. I recall my camp counselor saying to me when we pedaled our last mile and unpacked before our parents came to collect us that he was so worried about me from that first episode but I proved him wrong. I like to prove people wrong. At that time, I was already separating from my mom and dad. I was adopted. I had known for years and it hurt more and more over time. I was angry. Even then, at that age I decided that they sent me to camp so far away because they needed a break from me. Over the past three decades they proved me wrong, I just had to see it clear.

  That clarity keeps coming, although there was a decade that nothing was clear but anger. It couldn't have been much after camp that I started drinking, wine from our Episcopal Church, wine from my parent’s cases of wine in the basement. And beer from wherever. Even after I lost a friend, who was drunk, to suicide in 9th grade I kept at it. I kept at it and added pot and acid. I was violent and loved to see my own blood and scar my hands by punching windows out and took such pride in the white T-shirt covered in blood stains from my knuckles. 

  I know how lucky I am to have come through that. Not long ago I heard from Jeff, a kid I drank with in high school. He just got out of prison. Six years. He survived a suicide attemp when he lost his mother. One of his first messages to me was “compared to what you were doing before I never would have thought it would turn our like this. For either one of us.”

  I was heading down a dark path. I stole money, sneaking into my parent’s bedroom and pulling as many twenties as I thought I could get away with to buy pot and alcohol. I used right through juvie and a second ninth grade. The bike was still with me, getting high and hauling ass through the college campus,  using the bike as a means to vandalize over larger distances, riding out into the middle of the country in the pitch black of a farming community night, sleeping in the backyard next to my bike because I refused to go inside. 

  The last two fights I ever got in started and ended on a bike. The second to last one I thought my best friend stole my bike. I showed up at his house to get it back and he came out with a knife. We spent the next fifteen minutes kicking each other’s asses for nearly two blocks before the cops showed up. I split and he got taken in. The last person I ever hit was my dad. After I struck him I walked to the garage, got on my bike and rode away. I hate to think about it. I am sure he does too. But this is a story about the hard things, and forgiveness and love, so I have to be real about it. About everything. The point is, I found comfort, escape and ultimately redemption on the bike, the bikes that they bought me because they loved me no matter what.

After that I was sent to a foster home. I drank the first night there and most every home pass. I drank and smoked pot right until the night before I was going to rehab. Two hits of acid, and a good deal of pot with my closest friends out in the country as a going away blast. I rode my bike home in the middle of the night, smoked the last of my pot and fell asleep, me and my bike, a Trek 400, leaning against a tree my mom planted in our backyard. The next morning, I left my bike and my home and my friends behind and went to rehab. I was seventeen. I've never used a drug or had alcohol since that night. But the bike was there for me when I got home. 

  I would ride around town with long hair, wearing a white T-shirt and cutoff jeans, free again. In my five years of high school there was only one assignment I ever felt good about. In English class I wrote a short piece about a ten mile out and back ride out a road that went passed our backyard, straight out to the very boundary between our town and the farmland that stretched out to Indiana and then Illinois and further west in a near endless patchwork of corn stitched together with asphalt thread. I recall writing how I took in every detail on the ride away from home, each house and car and red wing blackbird and shallow slack of electric wire draped between the telephone poles. It was at the turnaround that all I could remember was the speed I could carry up each rise and the futility of the wind to hold me back. It was a true story, and I wore a T-Shirt on that ride.

  In high school I started racing with the college kids, racing in collegiate races when I wasn't in college. I was fast, and somewhere during my junior year I traded a T-Shirt for jerseys, up until today when I left the jersey in the basket and slipped the T-Shirt, with a wince, over my head.

A lot has happened in the years between those days and now. On bikes I have raced from Quebec to Florida to the very edges of the east coast, in every Midwestern state, all the way to Nevada. I raced against the best Americans, including riders that ended up at the highest levels of the sport. My friend Johnnie, an expert on all things race related told me I was one of the ten fastest American sprinters and that pisses me off because I wanted to be the fastest. But racing wasn't my destiny, in the early 2000’s I started having difficulty controlling my bike, especially descending mountains and in high speed situations. My arms would start to shake till my bike would try and buck my ass off. On hilly rides with other people I frequently would go last on descents to make sure I wouldn't take anyone out. So, I quit racing.

I had experts look me over. Since 2014 my shoulder got to the point that I couldn't stand on the bike, put pressure on my shoulder when braking, let alone sprint. I have watched dozens of sprints go up the road on group rides because I couldn't give what I got. I hope this shoulder surgery changes that.

  I want to ride with my friends. I have never been on a ride with my sister and her husband and her two kids; one day me and Strongland and his mama are going to pull on some T-Shirts and go for a spin. I want those things more than you will know. I want my mom's legs to work. I want her to be able to walk outside, take Strongland's hand and show him the trees, and the cicada husks, and watch their hair shift easily in the light air and I want to walk with them. Taking stock of my life brought those tears. Tears of sorrow and gratitude.

  I thought of my dad and the last time me and Strongland and his mama went to see them. Things are hard on him now. He's losing his wife of fifty-three years to Alzheimer's. And yet he is kind and compassionate and still wants to be my father. He offered to fill my truck up with gas. I think he feels bad about the rough years that seem so long ago. I do too, so I let him. The night before we left, he offered to clean the windshield of the truck. I think he's forgiven me for the rough years that don't seem that long ago. I have too, so I let him. Standing with Strongland, we watch as he takes his time wiping away the grime on the tall windshield, presenting us with the gift of clarity.

  Others come into my mind now, I ride for them; Art who “doesn’t run much anymore”, for Kathryn H. and Jason M. and Tony B., all lost to suicide, and Alison, taken by drugs and a broken body, and Cyndi K. whose body gave out and couldn't save herself, and a guy I know in a hospital bed unable to hunt the deer he see’s out his window, for Mike, a friend from high school, a Marine and marathoner, that is staring down a Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis, and Mac, who just got a pacemaker to keep his kind heart beating.

I feel everything so strongly, and differently as I evolve. I don't need to be fast. I don't need to win. I want to be a good son, and ride in the glory of the everyday, when my mother cannot.  I will be stubborn, if that's the price to pay along with a burning shoulder, so be it. I was desperate for the freedom that a ride offers. I wished I could carry my Mother into the wind and the light and freedom from her suffering. But like I said, life races by you in the shadows and light and you can never equal its pace even when you break your heart trying.