Me And Cal

Cal

This is Cal. He's 82 years old. He likes to ride his bicycle. Cal has trouble with one of his hips and that makes it a little hard to walk. But not to ride. And riding, he says, actually makes it easier to walk for awhile after pedalling.

"When you're on a bike you're just using your own power," he said.

Cal moves that bicycle slowly. The cars and trucks whipped past us along 127 St. this afternoon. There were still hail pellets on the asphalt. We talked about things at about 8 kmh.

Cal was still fired up when I first slowed down to ride with him for those few blocks north. On Stony Plain Road, he said, he had stopped at two businesses to ask to use the washroom. They said no.

"I'm 82 years old," he said. "I'm not going to damage the place. I should have just taken a leak right there and fought it in court."

Okay, Cal is my kind of guy.

Cal still had another 30 blocks to go to get home.

Cal has been riding his current bike for about a year. The previous one was stolen. He remembers the date of the crime.

"I was so mad," he said. "I went out and bought another one. Got it for under $500."

He asked me if I always stop at stop signs. I told him most times, but not always, especially if the intersection is clear.

"Me, too."

We talked politics. We talked about Lougheed and change. We shook hands at the lights on 118 Ave. He took his glove off before shaking hands. He looked me in the eye. His eyes are young.

Those businesses should have let Cal use their washrooms.

Cal



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hello!

Image
The potential socialness of a bicycle is built right into its roofless and windshieldless and doorless frame. It is easy to say hello on a bicycle. Like this morning. These sidewalkers nodded to me in unison at the exact instant I nodded to them. I said hello to the jogger, and he waved back. Hi, I said, to the dog walkers and the dog, and they nodded a greeting back. Both joggers smiled and said hello as our lives passed. I said hello to the squirrel. I said hello to the woman walking with poles and she returned the hello. The jogger looked over and I said hello as she said hello. I said hello to this fellow egg picker upper and we talked for a couple of minutes. Her bicycle comes out April 1. She is excited. Hello, I said. Hi, she said. I said hello to the  man on the other end of this leash and he said he and his dog were enjoying the beautiful morning. I said hello to this woman and she said hello, and we laughed ab
Read more

:)

Image
One of the joys and dangers of studying in the MACT program is that you start to feel scared enough to feel confident enough to fool around and try simple new things with technology. The danger is that you're not good enough not to spend most of your time fiddling around doing those things. And, so, this morning I am proud to announce that, taken by the hand, I have managed to embed html vimeo code into my blog. Please, no applause. This is not much, I know. Your basic 8 year old can do more. Asleep. But it is a minor accomplishment for me, because of me. And how I get in the way with my pre-wired reaction that new things won't work. The effect of that kind of thinking (or that lack of thinking) is that I transform the machine in front of me into an antagonistic force working to undo me. But it does remind me of me when I attribute malevolence to the skies when they conspire to bring rain on a morning of golf! Either way, that's bad storytelling. On another leve
Read more

On the way to and from Coffee Outside

Image
I have wondered about the the flight to artifice when natural beauty is encountered. Standing in front of a mountain vista, I will routinely offer some version of, wow, it looks like a painting! Or like a postcard. Or that is just out of a movie! This morning as I pedalled in the MacKinnon Ravine the April snow felt etched onto the limbs of the trees. I have often felt dissatisfied with this transposing of the beauty out there into the key of human making.  But, maybe, painting and photography and engraving and the rest of the human arts are as natural to us, as lovely, as nature itself. Or, maybe, so entwined that it is hard to tell nature and art apart. My bicycle has certainly transported me to feelings of freedom I would not have achieved were it not a piece of technology.  Who are we, really?                                                                           At the turn at the bottom of the ravine, a plastic orange fence encircles a soggy sink
Read more