Mendel Letters 93 — My Ticket to Ride
September 3, 2022
Dear Mendel,
You bought me my first two-wheel bicycle in 1960, a beautiful Red Schwinn, and started my love of cycling. I am a bike endorphin addict. Cycling clears my mind. I always bring along a pen and pad to jot down notes about whatever I am thinking about. In fact, I started this letter yesterday while biking along the Belt Parkway bicycle path in a temperature-humidity index day of over 1000F. I drank a lot of water.
Over the years I have biked along canals in upstate New York, New Jersey, Washington DC, and in Ireland, on Texel Island and along the dikes in the Netherlands, on roadways in most of the eastern United States, along the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, in Montreal and Vancouver, and through British and French parks. I’ve ridden in the New York City Five-Borough Bike Tour more than 30 times and in the New York Century over a dozen times. I did the full 100 miles three times. The last few years they ran the Century my friend and I who rode together joked that we did the European century, 100 kilometers, a little over 60 miles.
My hardest ride was the 82-kilometer fifty-mile trip from Rosarito to Ensenada on the Mexican Baja Peninsula. I signed up while attending an education conference in San Diego. The first 35 kilometers were relatively flat as we rode through Pacific Ocean villages and then we hit “El Tigre,” a mountain that was much steeper than anything I had ever biked. Going up was slow and extremely difficult, but going down turned out to be worse because we rode the entire way in a hailstorm. The mountain was also desolate so there was no place to rest or shelter. The final 16 kilometers were flat and along the coast again, but I had to pedal fast to make up for lost time and reach the finish line in time for my bus ride back to San Diego.
With your vision, you couldn’t ride by yourself, but I remember we did do family rides at least twice on the Atlantic City boardwalk. Warren and I had rented regular bikes. You and Fay rode a tandem with you peddling from the back and Fay sitting in front “seeing.”
When I outgrew the Schwinn, you got me a used delivery “truck bike” from one of the local E.L. Grant Highway storeowners in the Bronx that you knew. On Saturdays I rode the Schwinn and the truck bike over to Bubba Ray’s apartment on Grant Avenue and 169th Street for lunch. In 1965, I inherited my stepbrother Harold’s English Racer when he got married and I used it as a volunteer to deliver flyers for the Lindsay mayoral campaign. I also started taking longer rides all over the Bronx and to visit relatives in Westchester.
When Solomon was born in 1978, I bought a used women’s bike with a rear mounted child seat so I could drop him off and pick him up at daycare and ride around the Brooklyn neighborhood with him on the back. Solomon and I did our first Five-Borough Bike Tour together in 1990 when he was 12 and in 2000, for my fiftieth birthday present, we did a two-day trip along the Erie Canal towpath.
The Red Schwinn was also my first bicycling accident. I jumped the curb and crashed into a building on Jesup Avenue and 172 Street when I refused to slow down on the final lap of a close race.
I have probably had a dozen cycling accidents over the last six decades, two of which are memorable. I was biking with friends on a back road in southwestern Virginia when I made a left turn and bounced off an approaching car that went through a stop sign. I wasn’t hurt and my bike wasn’t damaged but the impact knocked off the car’s passenger side window and scratched paint and the driver wanted me to pay for the damage. He called a local cop who turned out to be his friend. The cop spoke with him and then issued ME a ticket for riding on the wrong side of the road, or maybe for wearing a red bandana and sounding like a New York Jew. When the cop approached me I told him that where I was from and there was an accident involving a car and a bicycle the first thing an officer did was check to see if the bike rider was okay. I also pointed out that the stop sign and stop line were about twenty feet behind where the collision took place, but he didn’t care. I later learned that in Virginia if you were partly responsible for an accident, you couldn’t sue for damages. He gave me the $35 ticket to establish my partial culpability so that I couldn’t sue his friend.
The second accident was more serious. I was riding in the bike lane on the Prospect Park West side of the park on my way to a doctor’s appointment. It was drizzling and the roadway was damp. I stopped to turn and was plowed into by a delivery guy on a motorized bike who hit me directly on my left hip. He stopped to offer help, but when I realized he might be an undocumented immigrant I told him he needed to leave before police came. I managed to get back up on my bike and role downhill to the doctor’s office. I couldn’t pedal or walk. I had to chain up the bike and take a cab home. I called Judi’s aide who brought down a walker with a seat so I could make it upstairs. That evening we were having Rosh Hashanah dinner. I used my weight-lifters belt to create a harness for my leg and was able to finish cooking. The next morning it was clear that there was something significantly wrong. Felicia took me to a First Med where the doctor, I think it was a doctor, said I had a hip pointer. She manipulated muscles on the inside and outside of my leg relieving the pain a bit, but I still need to use the walker for almost a month.
I don’t blame you for the accidents and I do thank you for the lifetime of cycling. Only wish you could have joined me more.
Your son
Hard copies of these typed letters were discovered in an old camp trunk in the basement storage facility of one of the few buildings that remain standing in this Brooklyn neighborhood. The building is quite decrepit and is scheduled for demolition. The letters were found in November 2048 by a teenager who believes they were written by his great-grandfather. The letters are addressed to Mendel, the letter writer’s father, who appears to have been dead for at least six years when his son, whose name we are unsure of, started to write him. The son appears very agitated in some of the letters. With permission from the family, we are publishing them on the date they were written, only 28 years later.
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