Back in the Saddle Again

I’ve had a life-long love affair with bicycles. Starting with my first hundred pound Huffy in my youth then a more peer-acceptable Schwinn in my teen years. Later on, I got my first racing bicycle, a Peugeot. As I matured, I got a more sophisticated Cannondale then a Raleigh hybrid and finally a mountain bike and another Trek hybrid.

Last season when Brian was in town, we rented a couple of e-bikes and cruised my Palm Springs neighborhood. I tested out the pedal-assist gears and the throttle for longer hauls. The difference between a regular bicycle and this HRA-sanctioned mini-street rod was amazing. I was hooked.

When Sharon and I returned to Minnesota, I happened to come across a floor model on sale at my local bike shop and I was back in the saddle again. It had been a long time since I first ventured out beyond my hood to explore the greater Twin Cities area. Back in the day, it was nothing for me to take my hybrid, load it on my classic Ford Escape and go thirty or forty miles in the early morning hours. I developed a taste for touring that didn’t want to stop. Now I get to pick it up all over again.

It seems as if it was only yesterday when I was a casual interloper in the early morning world of iron riders and rail thin runners. They were early morning vagabonds who needed their cup of Joe to kick-start each day. It was an eclectic group of support crew, racers and runners gathered together to taste the first bite of dawn and forthcoming self-induced punishment.

After they left, I began my own Saturday morning meandering through the Twin Cities. There wasn’t an agenda or route to follow. My imagination and ever elusive recollections of times past would point me in some direction.

There had been some interesting feedback on my nostalgic trips visiting old haunts around the Twin Cities. Some readers liked the trips down memory lane. Others questioned why I kept going back almost as if I’m trying to relive my past. I thought I had touched on that in some of my blogs My Bootleg Years or I Found Susan’s House.

It used to be that during the summer months I’d take long bike rides to peruse my old haunts for changes or as a way to recap old memories still lingering there. But something happened this last time that altered that perception.

Surprisingly it wasn’t the old haunts that had changed. Instead, it was something that clicked differently inside my head this time around. I came to the sobering realization that not only were the old places gone but now they were relegated to the dust bins of history.

The Twin Cities had become a wasteland of relics from my past. A time long since forgotten except in black and white photos and old vinyl recordings. Time has that tendency to erase most vestiges of a period and in its place leave only vapid memory vapors that drift in and out of our consciousness from time to time. The changes were all around me but I didn’t see it until that summer.

I first discovered the Midtown Greenway many years ago. It’s a four-and-a-half-mile old railroad bed that had been converted to a bike path. That route begins on the Mississippi River Boulevard and ends around Lake Calhoun and Lake of the Isles. It became my gateway to downtown Minneapolis, Nord East, the Mississippi River, and many points North and East.

The intoxicating smell of soap weed and other noxious plants permeate the air. It brings back poignant memories of delivering newspapers past weed-choked empty fields those warm summer mornings.

An old black man is sitting outside his public housing unit. He’s smoking the first of many funny cigarettes. He waves and shouts: How ya doing? I answer “Just great” as I fly by with a casual nod. He smiles back and takes another puff, lost in his own little world.

The West Bank is where drunks and druggies and the homeless used to pester me outside the Triangle Bar. Now there are new groups of immigrants taking over the streets. The crowds used to be white. Now, not so much. The Triangle bar was shuttered decades ago and with it a visible reminder of my youthful days of hopes and dreams and wild aspirations.

A couple of blocks from my first apartment there used to be a seedy rundown strip mall with a Red Owl Grocery store where I got my meager staples and tins. Progress erased any and every vestige of that old neighborhood.

A grassy corner is all that remains where my squalid apartment building used to languish. The General Mills Research Lab replaced it. Now that building is also a thing of the past and reportedly going to be torn down.

Dinkytown was my hangout, refuge, local dive and music venue when I lived nearby. I tried to capture its ambiance in my novella: ‘Agnes, First Taste of Love.’ Granted, it wasn’t the Triangle Bar but its cast of characters wasn’t that far behind.

If rubble could talk it would speak volumes about Dinky town of the past. But those drab dirty old buildings are gone now along with their voices rendered mute. They’ve been replaced by developer’s fact sheets and city planner’s visions for a new student hometown. Dinky town today isn’t even close to what it once was. Now that they’ve ripped the soul out of the place city fathers want to make it an historic district. What a joke.

Wandering through the U of M campus did little to regenerate old memories of my brief existence there as a student. The closest I came to captured that old mind-set was the U of M School of Journalism. But that was before I dropped out, got drafted and began the rest of my life in earnest.

The Dew Drop on the campus of the University of St. Catherine’s was a font of old memories. There were a couple of girlfriends back then and toe-dancing with romance as if I knew what I was doing. When that ploy failed, I began tripping around the globe until that wandering ended in matrimony.

The old Ford auto plant, once a staple of local fixtures during my youth, is now gone. In its place has sprung up a one hundred-and-twenty-five-acre development site full of a wide variety of housing and some commercial entities. Little it seems has remained of my youth in terms of buildings,

Part of me thinks I won’t be retracing my old bike routes anymore. It won’t be because of bad memories. Rather the absence of visible landmarks makes it harder to reconcile memories with recollection, nostalgia with history and reality with a reflective glance at my past. It’s a gravel road that has long since been paved over.

Yet time is on my side. I still get to look back through old photographs in awe and amazement at what once was while still listening to those old familiar musical refrains. Once on the road in my new e-bike, I’ll be a younger man, with a volt of electricity to guide me along the way, still eager to blaze new memory trails and perhaps crossing paths with some old memory haunts yet undiscovered. That wouldn’t be a bad thing either.