The Bike Tragedy

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We truly are a tad pathetic as a society.

President Biden slipped off his bike on Sunday.

I must’ve seen mention of it at least 400 times. In some cases, it led off the news program.

Now, it wasn’t that he fell to the ground writhing in pain. The exact opposite happened, actually. He was up and back on the bike in seconds.

Made me think of a couple of bike accidents that I wished they’d got on film when I was a kid.

I rode around the neighborhood on my older sister’s bike. First, it was clearly a bike for a female rider and my buddies knew it and broke my stones about it endlessly.

Secondly, we lived on a big hill that we had to descend to go anywhere.

That bike didn’t have breaks.

I used my feet.

Like Fred Flintstone.

Our good buddy lived at the bottom of the hill.

I once tried to navigate the turn without slowing down.

I went over the handlebars and into a deep ditch as the bike skittered off into the abyss.

I jumped right up too.

To see the neighbor mom bent over laughing in hysterics as she tried to ask me if I was okay.

Then the big accident.

My brother, John, and I worked on a farm a ways away. We got up at 5:00 and headed out each morning. He was always in much better shape than me and I would try to get a jump start so that we might arrive at the farm at the same time.

One morning I cruised down that hill, not even trying to brake at all.

John was late leaving the house so when I got to the bottom of the hill, I suddenly turned the bike to catch a glimpse of him coming down.

He hit me head on because he hadn’t been expecting me to stop and turn.

At 5:05 on a summer morning we were both laying in the road, bleeding, groaning and screaming a little.

“I’m going to get up in a minute or two, and then I’m going to beat the hell out of you,” John said.

We both laughed.

Laid there and laughed and laughed.

Imagine if they’d caught that one on the news.

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