An avid cyclist

Chances there is a raccoon currently getting cozy in the basket: 99%.

I had not exactly been on the market for a bike. Always a little bit, since the last one I had was stolen shortly before I’d have needed to sell it during a move, but I’d been more thinking I’d moved into the maybe-I’ll-take-up-sewing stage of life, contemplating, if any gadget, a sewing machine.

But then the Polish Festival in Roncesvalles—the one whose name briefly lost the “Polish,” but the woke festival-police lost the battle, or something, whatever—included a special from the local bike store. $300 CAD for a Dutch-style bike. The very only sort of bike I could get excited about, style-wise, and better in terms of not needing to ride hunched over. I’m not trying to climb mountains or enter the Tour de France. If this, whatever it is, can serve my purposes, fantastic.

But what are these purposes? It cannot, in its current arrangement, in my current state of biking ability, transport children, which is basically the only reason I ever have for actually needing to leave the house. I hadn’t biked or driven a car since 2015, so my road skills themselves are, unlike the bike itself, quite rusty. I did a test ride at the festival, confirming that I hadn’t entirely forgotten that which is quintessentially impossible to forget, but also that if anyone could forget, it would be me.

The hope is to be able to do things like avoid the streetcar when going around the city. I live on the streetcar line but not (quite) the subway, so this would mean a half-hour biking rather than a month waiting for a rerouted streetcar. But then I look on Google Maps and it’s like, but I am expected to do this in the road where there are cars? What if a car needs to turn, and does so Toronto-style, mowing everyone down in its path? What if someone opens the door of a parked car? Because people have been known to do that.

I decided to face my fears and, helmet very much on, rode the bike home on mostly empty streets from the bike shop to my let us say bike-shop-adjacent house. I mean it was a few blocks, and served as a necessary confidence boost.

Yes, this is like the Absolutely Fabulous where Edina goes ‘jogging’ and Saffy asks where she went and after Edina does this complicated, breathless accounting of street names, Saffy concludes that Edina has jogged around the block.

Do I still think these may be my last written words, and that the 11 minute bike trip I have in mind, including as it does a major (if bike-lane-having) road, is beyond my capacities? Kind of. But I will definitely watch from the College streetcar to see how the cyclists out the window are managing, so that next time I can join their ranks.