Birthday

Today is my twenty-fifth birthday, and I’m celebrating by launching a project I’ve been meaning to start for more than a year, ever since I biked past a smiling dredlocked woman walking down Mississippi Avenue with a baby strapped to her belly and a five-foot tall sapling growing out of her backpack, the branches bouncing and swaying with each sandled step. Every day, I see things during my bike commute that are strange, funny, fascinating, and moving (sometimes moving directly at me). These encounters are little stabs of joy, narrative gifts that I horde and tell myself I’m going to write down, but too often lose by the time I’ve locked my bike up at the end of the day. There’s the waving old couple joy-riding in a pony cart on the sidewalk along Mock’s Crest. There’s the spray-painted messages on the north bike/ped sidewalk of the Broadway Bridge, first: RICH MAN’S WAR, then, twenty feet further: POOR MAN’S FIGHT, all of which was painted over with silver within forty-eight hours. There’s the man in the bowtie and tophat casually unicycling down a bikelane in Northwest, careful to use the appropriate hand signals when making a right turn.

Yesterday, biking up the nasty stretch of Greeley that is the absolute worst part of my commute, I stopped at a red light, and saw a pair of metal crutches abandoned in the weeds along the busy roadway. Mind you, this is at least a mile from anything remotely walkable, with 45-mile-an-hour traffic coming from five different directions. The only reason anyone would stand there is to hit up drivers idling at the light for spare change. The crutches were neatly crossed over each other, as though the owner had experienced a miraculous healing, and simply set them down and walked off.

Ben says maybe the person using the crutches was lifted by the Rapture. He says maybe the Rapture has already happened, but only three or four people ascended, so nobody noticed.