New Bike

Today was the day my custom-built “commuter project” would “most likely be ready,” the bike shop owner told me, and so at 10:05 I showed up with my old clunker trade in. I’d pedaled the half mile to the shop with an 8-degree head freeze.

“We just have to put on the tires and adjust the brakes,” the college freshman on duty told me while the shop owner ran helter-skelter, dealing with other customers.

At 12:15 M called the shop. “Are you coming home for lunch, or what?” she asked.

“We can call you when it’s finished,” the freshman said. “It might be an hour yet.”

Now, sitting in a bike shop watching your bike slowly take shape before your eyes is fun because it’s not generally how commerce happens these days, and it’s incredibly boring because it takes so long, and it’s interesting because you get to watch other customers’ idiosyncrasies even as they look at the dude back in the corner sitting on a stool like he’s not doing anything, which he isn’t because he’s waiting for his bike, and it’s incredibly mind numbing because you’re not really doing anything except sitting there hoping to absorb bicycle wisdom from the atmosphere of the cluttered little hole-in-the-wall shop.

“Is that van outside really electric?” one customer asked the owner.

“Yes, but it lacks batteries and a motor,” he replied.

“Really, it’s a storage shed that looks like a van,” the freshman told me.

Another customer eyed a bike on a repair stand. “I want that,” he said.

“It’s the same bike model the [such-and-such] team uses in the Tour de France,” the owner said. “It’s the best aerodynamic design wind tunnel tested. All carbon fiber. The cranks cost a thousand dollars. A local doctor rides time trials with it.”

I leaned over to the freshman. “How much does the whole bike cost?”

“More than some cars,” he smirked.

Another customer, a young woman there with her dad, was getting a bike for a triathlon this summer. “Isn’t it pretty?” she kept saying, and then said that she didn’t know how to use the bike rack, since her boyfriend that she just broke up with always put it on her car when they’d go riding. So her dad and the shop owner went out to put the rack on the car, and she stood inside chatting with an older man who’d just gotten back from skiing in someplace where it was really, really cold. When the shop owner and her dad came back in, she asked, “Did you guys figure it out? It took you forever!”

I just kept sitting there, until that call came from M, and then I pedaled my old clunker back home for lunch, after which I dozed on the futon until the freshman called me back in. I again suffered tremendous brain freeze, but this time came away with the new bike.

It looks very much like my old one, but with matching tires, fenders, and more black components. It weighs about half as much, though–and is much stronger, with more gears, and other great improvements.