Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!

Last fall, I faced the unfortunate let-down of having my bicycle stolen, a dose of frustration mixed with a large amount of embarrassment due that fact that I had played a significant role in the series of events: I hadn't locked it up. Instead, my bike lock hung like a heavy necklace around the frame as whoever had stolen it, (presumably) wandered out of the bar around the corner from our apartment, stumbled down the sidewalk and happened to glance into the alleyway between our house, spotting a quicker way to get wherever he was going. The lock clanking against the metal frame as he lugged himself onto the seat, the squeaky pedal that I hadn't yet had the chance to oil screaming out with every rotation as he turned onto the street and pedaled away, all of the noise from the ruckus tugging at the pant leg of my sleep but failing to wake me, to get my attention.

The next few months had me eyeing every bike rack, every cyclist zooming by for signs of my blue Schwinn road bike wrapped in reflective tape. I imagined spotting my bicycle down the street, the rider stopped at a street light, and off I'd be running to catch him, to throw him off my bike, to kick dirt in his face. But it never got to that point. I never found my bike. And then when the thaw came and bikes started emerging from the banks of snow like prizes from a cereal box, I thought of rusted chains, flat tires, rims warped by baseball bats wielded by drunken, bored college students. In one harrowing vision, I imagined my bike at the bottom of Lake Mendota, the chain woven with seaweed, the seat gnawed by fish and bleeding foam.

Now, my bike has returned to me.

This is how it happened: Leslie and I, on the way to meet a caterer this past Thursday, happened to drive down a street not six blocks away--one we had driven down many times on our way to church--and there it was, sitting pristinely on the top of a snow bank, resting against a telephone pole, practically waving, "Hi!" I could say nothing more sensible in that split second of recognition than, "That's my fucking bike!" I knew it the way a mother knows the cry of her child. The best part, the bike still worked. Practically better, in fact, than before it had been stolen.

Which leads to my point about writing. In falling asleep, my brain used to come up with "brilliant" and "indispensable" lines for poems, lines that I feared I'd lose forever if I didn't pull myself out of bed, find a pen and notebook, and write down. I used to be so frightened of losing thoughts that I'd carry a notebook around in my pocket. What I realized slowly, after months of reading these "brilliant" lines the next morning, after years of filling reporter's notepads with scribbles, was that most of this "brilliance" was junk, stuff that seemed significant in the moment only to reveal itself as pointless on the page.

I rejected my notebooks and filled my pockets instead with keys, loose change, sales receipts, chapstick. I stopped worrying about losing lines, letting them come and go like old friends. What I found out was that most things worthy of keeping around come back. It's not the naive "If you love something, give it away" platitude. It's not my conclusion that fate plays a large role in life. It's something simpler--that things will come back when they're needed. Like my bike, who left me in the fall a few weeks before I would've been forced to place it in storage only to return with the thaw, straight-rimmed and only slightly rusted. Or an image I hadn't written down springing to mind as the cursor in my blank Word document blinks and blinks and blinks and the pressure of being brilliant (or at least interesting) threatens to grind me down to soot. Off I am running out loose iambic pentameter. Off I am riding my bicycle to work, trying to beat the punch-in clock, my pedal singing out it squeals as we pull ourselves up the hill to the Capital and to the library beyond.