"Suicide Cycling Around the World"
That's the title a former co-worker said I should use for a memoir. Another friend was encouraging me to write about deploying to Iraq for a year, landing in country on my 56th birthday.
But Daria was sure the better book would be about biking.
I love bikes of all kinds: bicycles, motorcycles, scooters, and the various three-wheeled varieties. I love the sensation of speed, especially leaning into corners.
My first bike was a red tricycle. I mostly rode it in the driveway and on the sidewalk on the fairly busy street we lived on I was four--when we moved to an even busier street in another part of Stoneham, Massachusetts.
One afternoon, I was, according to a story my parents told for years after, riding in the driveway on a Saturday. I was three years old. Dad was at work. Mom went in the house with my then one-year-old sister. While speeding up and down the driveway on Hancock Street, I decided I could ride to the bakery in Stoneham Square.
They had jelly doughnuts!
All of my life, I have been able to see a route in my head that I traveled only once or twice. In this case, my mother had walked with me to the doughnut shop just a half mile away. Our house on Hancock Street was on the east side of Route 28. The doughnut shop was on the west side.
In the 1950s, Route 28 was the main road north from Boston to central New Hampshire including the state capital, Concord. I had to ride four blocks to Route 28, cross the four-lane highway and ride past the library and up the hill past the fish store to the middle of Stoneham Square.
Somehow I did it.
I got my doughnut. The baker told the owner of the drugstore next door about the little boy on the tricycle. Al Pullo, the owner of the drugstore, called my mom. She came to get me and was not pleased about my trip.
The next year we moved to Oak Street in Stoneham. At some point I got a Columbia 24-inch 2-wheel bicycle and was riding much further. At eight years old, I rode from Stoneham to Sullivan Square on Route 28 and took a subway to Boston and back. I hid the bike behind a dumpster and, surprisingly, it was there when I returned.
In the six decades since, I have ridden a bicycle in 41 countries and ridden roughly 200,000 miles. I did not ride bicycles between ages 13 and 36, but owned a dozen motorcycles.
Daria was right. Now I have to actually write it.
