Another Reason Bicycling Matters

     

I recently wrote a blog post describing why I’m less interested in participating in organized races (Why I Am Losing Interest in Organized Races).  Suffice it to say that awareness of this has been somewhat disorienting to me, resulting in quite a bit of quiet (and not so quiet) introspection and wondering.

My brother George.  And recent pleasant dreams.

George was four years older than me.  My childhood memories of him are that he played `rough’.  He never beat me up, though he was tough as steel, athletic and powerful.  I remember, once, when I was about 12 years old, whining to him that I wanted to see a movie playing at a drive-in he and his girlfriend were going to. Never did I imagine that they had no intention of `watching’ the movie.  Nevertheless, he relented and took me.  What a party crasher I must have been.

At times he would push me around so that I’d get on my back and fend him off with my legs and feet. We would both be laughing in this playful contest. 

When I tried to run away (to the back yard) he suggested I use our father’s ties as a rope to descend to the ground from our second-floor bedroom.  I’m sure he knew what he was doing.

In his adolescence and early adulthood, he became a physical and athletic phenomenon.  As a high school freshman, he played varsity football.  I once saw him empty a carful of noisy teenagers, reaching in and throwing them out, one by one. 

He was ferocious and fierce.  And he was a no-nonsense delinquent.  His buddies were local teenage hoodlums.  He was arrested for fights several times by the local police.  Our parents once had to collect him from the village jail, discovering that he was bruised and bloody after resisting arrest by four cops. 

He dropped out of high school.  Somehow he enlisted in the Air Force, only to be discharged for misconduct after a year.

We drifted apart as we grew up.  I was anything BUT a gifted physical and athletic person. 

One day, at 24, I got a phone call from my father (a shocking rarity) telling me that George was in a serious motorcycle accident in California and that he wanted me to join him on a flight to his hospital.  He had `T-boned’ a vehicle while on his motorcycle and had broken his back on a curb.  He was paralyzed from the waist down. 

After a full year in VA hospitals, he was discharged in a wheelchair. 

He spent the next four years struggling to adjust to being an ill-educated, temperamentally intolerant cripple.

Again, I got that phone call from our father.  My big brother George had been found dead at 33 in his apartment.  He had taken all his leg tranquilizers, put them in a McDonald’s milkshake, pulled the bedsheet over his head and taken his own life.

Not a bike ride goes by that I don’t think of him when I’m pushing and pushing and pushing with my powerful legs on the bike pedals.