For Kay Ryan Out Loud

•December 22, 2007 • 1 Comment


Thanks Kay, for the annual clever visual pun Christmas card.
I always eagerly await your drawings, they are such limber plays on words.
Perhaps you are like me in that you enjoy hearing the language cut in the ‘wrong’ place, yielding up strange new words, names, ideas…and when you mention what you just heard, your friend is in on the joke.

So every year another great hand-colored drawing that I will puzzle over for about four minutes, give up, and open so I can see the True Meaning. This year’s : a trio of birds crammed in the cab of a blue pickup, which has three oversized dinner forks in the bed.
I thought about all the birds in Christmas carols….partridge in a pear tree (paar tryggs in a Pertuis?) Naahh…there were three.. but they definitely didn’t look like hens. They were songbirds.
Fork-hauling birds.
Geddit?
I didn’t.
I had to look.
Pulled out , er sorry, pulled out a sheet of blank paper and scribbled a scholarly wombat with spectacles, with a bomb–fuse lit–going off in her mind, and a couple of thin-beaked birds, one with earphones and a backward cap, the other one just wondering with a ? over its narrow head….
Brought it to Kay and Carol’s this fine fool moon solstice evening.
A two blog night.
Kay was in the kitchen, Carol on the phone…I sat and watched Kay wrestle with it, and after a healthy couple of minutes she said, “can I look now?” and laughed when the really sick, kind-of-a-stretch pun hit her..
Carol came out and said, “did you guess it?”
“No, I had to look”
Carol braced herself on the table and stared at the picture….birds…French hens? But there are only two…they don’ t look like hens, anyway…”
I decided to throw in a hint. Both Kay and Carol teach English. Carol runs the English Department at College of Marin.
“What is the wombat DOING?” I prod.
“Uh… reading? Yah, he’s reading to them…the hat’s on backwards…the other one’s scratching its head….”
“Teaching….pedantic…professing…extemporizing…”
“O.K., what KIND of birds are they?”
“Anything but hens…. they’re ….DOVES?!”
Ahem…
In another couple of minutes she’s saying…Two….ddu du…DOVES” trying to remember the Carol (get it, a Christmas CAROL? As in Carol ADAIR? My joke to myself….
All Carols have a definite advantage, the singsongy lilt their name inheres. In -hairs? How do you spellit again?
So…finally finally finally she grasps the thistle:
Tutor….Dull…..DOVES!

Posted in Jacquie Phelan

Solstice Errand Run

•December 21, 2007 • Leave a Comment

The longest night of the year draws in a deep, chill breath.
Perfect for a trail ride, but it’s not OK to ride on narrow trails here. Shame on the authority of the County for failing all these 30 years not to address and accommodate this expanding group of outdoor people.

But at least running’s legal (note to historians: the Ho-Has –hateful Old Hiker Assn–tried to ban running in the early 1970’s when THAT boom hit. No success, since joggers could just say they were walking fast, and resume speed after talking to the ranger. But there were indeed rangers out, citing runners for disturbing the peace! Good practice for the early 80’s….

I chose to just do errands with the bike trailer because the air was so sweet and crisp, I couldn’t countenance car travel. Yes, i had a hundred pounds of junk to deal with, but that’s what trailers R 4! Watch those tight turns, though.

After dropping off the unneeded clothing, knicknacks and books at Salivation Army I bought 50 lbs of ‘food grade’ salt (it’s been stripped of its minerals to be sold back to us in supplements! Canny, huh?
Funny, canning’s what I had in mind..
Hoping groceries had the little 2-lb boxes of pickling salt was getting tiresome.
And while I was there (Chinese grocery kitty-corner from Salivation Army) why not a 25 lb sack o’ jazzmin rice for he who must eat no wheat. Thus laden I aimed homeward.

Third street in San Rafael is a four lane one-way freeway funnel route, and the alternative route is super crowded shopper-packed Fourth. I almost always opt for the four-laner…but hadn’t done it at 9 mph in a couple years.
You know where this is going, right?
Mid-block between A and B streets, I hear a honk. The light’s green, I’m in the far right lane, and traffic passes me on the left doing 35 (the limit is 25mph). The motorist in question rolls down her passenger window and blasts at me –over her elderly passenger’s head–“You shouldn’t be on the street!!” before peeling away.
I can only smile and wave (very uniform reply adopted early to save skin).
The light goes red , and I’m not my usual self with that load on my ass, so I don’t have to get a lecture at the next place they have to stop.
An old man crosses the street, smiling broadly. He hadn’t heard the honk, or the little screech of indignation…he was just checkin’ out the custom trailer, a yellow and red circusy looking thing that I ‘ve been known to pick up little brothers from airport busses with.

“We should ALL have those!” he beamed.

And on the way home I thought, “that pretty much sums up the county. Half the people are truly wounded that you’re in their way, and the other half are cheering you on.”

One always prays the former don’t clean you off the road with their bumper.

And maybe one even wishes the latter dig their old dustcycle out of the basement….and may the hateful hikers someday lighten up a little. The unshakeable opinion is such a chore to maintain in the face of global change.

Posted in Uncategorized

Size Medium is The Message

•December 19, 2007 • 7 Comments

I don’t want my reader/riders thinking I run around naked ALL the time….I give a lot of thought to the rags I pull on. Like that universal base layer, my tee-shirt.

To me, a t-shirt is a tube that delivers a message– just like television–but you put your head– not your foot– through it.

Clothing historian James Laver says: “Clothing is nothing less than the furniture of the mind”.

Before clothing, body decoration did the job: a memorable design had the power to impress one’s friends and enemies, as well as identify the wearer as part of a group. When you combine clothing with decorative symbols that indicate status, you get things like shirts with tiny alligators on them, heinously ugly bags with meaningful initials, and a hundred different “brands” of otherwise identical blue jeans. In fashionable circles it is critical to flash wearable signs of wealth so “sorting” (people) is easier. After all, you can’t park your Beamer inside restaurants and other public places.

Furniture-wise, the t-shirt is the folding camp chair of the mind. Comfy, sturdy, portable. So indispensable, you don’t leave home without one. Your sweetheart’s slightly used shirt makes a great perfumed pillowcase for those long, out-of-town trips.

They began humbly enough: a knitted cotton undergarment that went unnoticed for years –clothes can’t talk unless they show–then broke free (reputedly in Rebel Without a Cause) to proclaim: Watch This Space! It didn’t take long for the makers of cigarettes, automobiles, kid’s toys– anything and everything– to realize what humans have known for millennia: we advertise who we are via ”threadspeak”. Still, the t-shirt’s the antidote to hype.

First there’s the fact that you chose a t-shirt over, say, a silk blouse or a Brook’s Brothers long sleeve. (Message: “I intend to be comfortable” except in Colorado where it says “I don’t care if I freeze a little on the descents”). Then there is what is screened on the shirt, stamping a message upon a message. Recently sighted: “B.U.M”. (=”I am anything but” ) “The one who dies with the most toys, etc”. “Team Betty” . “Chanel”.

Folks that wear a logo-less t-shirt (usually sporting a slightly baggy breast pocket) cannot avoid stating a message anyway: “I despise clutter”. Graphics as well as words vie for our attention: the horizontal stripes on a cigarette model’s perky t-shirt suggest that young girls to pick up a Newport menthol to stay thin. A well-done tie-dye is worth a thousand articulate“wow!s”. Shredded, chewed-up shirts are witness to a rider’s reckless abandon, or calculated gnarliness, depending on who did the shredding: the local manzanita shrubs or the wearer.

T-shirts insist that you gaze. There are small risks. One reads the message even if it means getting caught staring at the chest of an innocent bystander. If you’re the moody type, consider the layered look so you don’t confuse people with mismatched sartorial & facial signals. Why be limited to the truth about what you own and how you spend your free time? Thanks to the huge variety of status t-shirts available today, you can lie about the car you drive, the school you went to, and the outdoor gear you play with. Useful when trading up socially, dangerous when using it to apply for jobs.

Clothes occupy mindspace, and your brain probably can’t quite shut its overstuffed middle drawer for all the t-shirts. An active human, no matter how much they sweat and tumble and slide, tends to build up enormous stockpiles of them.

Whereas the good designs are treasured for years, enhanced by splashes of blood, mud and spaghetti, a poorly-drawn design condemns a shirt to a nasty, brutish, and usually short life as a polishing rag. Race shirts are almost always terrible, and I once saw a schwag T-shirt handed out at a bike industry party get immediately put to use as a bike cleaning rag. Barely sixty seconds elapsed between the time the fellow (call him Turbo) sized up the shirt, then conscripted it for scrub duty. Turbo was conveying, through the subtle use of body language, the message that “boy, this artwork stinks”.

A hush fell momentarily, but talk resumed when it was discovered that the offending rag was in fact a blend of 50-50 cotton/ polyester, a wishy washy excuse for fabric if there ever was one. The underlying message from the producer of dreck to the luckless recipient is “well, we did spare some expense”. Ironically, 50/50s supposedly last longer and shrink less, but who cares? They’re so thin you can read through ‘em, and “cheap” is written all over them in invisible ink. Chainring marks and grease streaks actually add interest, like the telltale pro marks on your right calf.

A shirt of hundred percent cotton indicates a commitment. Face it, they can’t make cotton in the laboratory yet. It still has to grown, picked, traded on the stock market, combed, knitted, bootlegged, shipped… add a buck for each operation. Usually the ten or more sponsors listed on the back of the shirt bear this expense. Thus a blank-backed, or art-covered back in addition to a frontal design means you, the buyer, pay. Or the t-shirt maker is a starving artist, and the shirt is affordable, like our local handmade airbrushed designs.

Mass-produced or one-offers, they’re finite, and chances are, the damn things will become collectable. Oops they have. New York Times had a story about it…maybe I can haul it up….

The problem is, unlike collectibles like teacups and coins, shirts are prone to mildew under dark, damp conditions. If anyone felt like saving a few great ones, they would probably have to go the route of the overserious comic book collector: “wash your hands before touching! Wrap in poly bags! Season carefully for two hours in a warm oven!” Whoops, I know that poly bags destroy fabric. Read it somewhere. Please store your Grateful Dead tee’s in a cloth sack, in the dark! You can throw in a luminous plastic necklace to keep it company.

If you follow my heed, the end of the line doesn’t have to be in the rag bin or the austere collection. Simply cut a 14” square out of your favorite thirty shirts, add a backing and borders, and you get a her-(or his)Story Quilt. Flaunt your wealth of experience. Nothing’s cooler than one’s own seamy narrative about Life in The Fat Lane, beginning at square one.

Posted in Alice B. Toeclips, Calendar, clothes, Jacquie Phelan

I did it for the Freedom

•December 17, 2007 • 3 Comments

As I sat at my friend Laura Ralph’s house on a fine summer’s garage sale day, she suddenly said to me, “My 72 year old aunt rode when she was young, and she had a bike with wooden rims!”

Well, that got my mind off the ennui of waiting for someone to decide to buy one of the vintage tablecloths I was selling, along with the toys & clothes her boy Peter had outgrown.

“No way, that must have been in the 20’s!” I exclaimed.
“Maybe, I’ll ask. You can talk to her yourself, I have her phone number right here.” Laura said.
So I called Laura’s Aunt Anna, who lives in Santa Cruz by herself in a small apartment in the middle of downtown.
Here’s what Anna Ralph told me in a single phone conversation, with a mirthful, matter-of-fact voice:

“I was born in 1933, the first of 5 kids by three different men. My mom was a single mom starting when I was 3 . We moved from rural Hollister to San Francisco. We took Grayhound bus, and with our other luggage an’ all, we had to leave behind my precious blue tricycle.…My mother started a new life up on Bernal Hill…and I kept reminding Mother about the left behind trike but she didn’t even want me on anything that could roll. So I never got around to riding a 2-wheeler”.

Mother re-married, had 3 kids with husband #2, got divorced, then, when I was 15, she married the third guy, had a kid, which I was elected to raise while she and him went to work.

Naturally I moved out, having had a fight w/stepfather #2. My little half-sis got the babysitting job. She was only 12, but I had to escape by going to college (SF State). I never had any kids of my own, because of uterine fibroids.
With all this freedom, I decided to finally get a bike! Guess what color?

So I went to Earnest Ohrt’s, a bike shop on Stanyan Street in San Francisco, across from Oscar Juner’s American Cyclery. There was a beautiful dark blue second- hand bike in the back, with wooden rims, sew-up tires, it was English… a single speed, cost me $ 35…It had been rented by Katherine Hepburn whenever she came to San Francisco ….at least that’s what they said.

My stepfather liked to say: I hear you’re pedalng your ass all over town!”. . .

Men where I worked said “You could buy a car for that!” I said: “I don’t WANT a car…I want a bike…” And I taught myself to ride it in Golden Gate Park.

I rode the bike to work every day at this deadly boring insurance company, on the weekends I would ride further and further across the Golden Gate Bridge, until I could go all the way to San Anselmo, which is a 40 mile round trip…and after a couple years, I needed a real vacation. I wanted to see the missions, so I planned a trip down Hwy 101, the inland route to Los Angeles when I was 19. The year ? 1952

Mother was worried about my safety. So Butch, my half brother (age 12), , was sent along with me to keep an eye on me, and by San Juan Bautista he ran out of steam since his bike was way too big–he was kind of short– so I put him and his sore knees and the big bike on the Salinas train back to SF. Back then you were allowed 100 lbs free luggage, and you just rolled the bike onto the baggage car… It was the Daylight Southern Pacific train.

… …I planned to ride for seven days. Ohrt had warned me to get started at 4 am, finish by 4 pm…I’d ride a few hours, then I would have breakfast, then carry on and snack on an apple, cheese…we didn’t have the fancy water bottles , but I did have a bottle carrier under the frame…

Mr Ohrt was the first American that rode in the Tour de France in 1929 … I asked for a lesson in mtn riding, he took me over to the cliffs in the Presidio, and showed me how to keep my left leg straight down when descending….this came in handy in the San Marcos Pass which is so long…back then, there were very few women on bikes anywhere, let alone on a highway. And you would see women in twos and threes, but I prefer to ride alone. Better to see the scenery that way, and no need to keep an eye on another (unpredictable) rider.

Pat Brown was our governor and they were putting in the freeway then, and they had just painted the yellow lines…just past Paso Robles, I was probably the first person to ride on the brand new surface! Truck drivers who did the drive daily began to realize that I was the same person going along 101, many miles further down the road each day, and they would wave and toot their horn. My trip totaled 200 dollars, staying in motels, and taking the train back home.

I can’t climb standing up, my muscles turn to water and I fall over. There were big hills that I got off and pushed. I’m big…. let’s say 180 lbs… and I’m 5’4”. Not your standard racer.

What happened to the bike after that? Well…it’s not a great ending for a bike. Butch stole it about a year after my big ride and pretended he was Evil Knievel, sailed it over a bonfire but he missed. That scorched the frame and took care of the wooden rims…and generated a bit of a family rift…he was a stubborn kid. He joined Pachuco gangs, got into all sorts of trouble…but became the owner of a succession of companies so, on my yearly Christmas card, I unfailingly reminded him that he owed me a bicycle. Forty years later he sent me 2 checks for 50 dollars to settle up.

In 1960, my husband and I rented bikes to ride Highway One through Big Sur, down the California coast. We took too much luggage  got poison oak, and camped or stayed in friend’s houses…Lime Kiln creek was appealing. There’d been some murders there, but we camped anyway…the ranger gave us a patch of ground next to the bathroom on 4th of July. No sleep that night. The next day, you could hardly see from the fog, we were frozen.

We thawed out riding all day to Morro Bay State Park. We told them we’d pedaled from Big Sur, but the surly ranger didn’t believe us, said there was no room, so we stayed in a motel & went to 2 dreadful Elvis movies. Ugh!.

Did I get any road rage? Yeah, a little…on my first trip down, near SLO someone threw an empty Coke bottle at me, and I saw the flying bottle in time, slowed the bike and it whizzed by my face…coulda killed me. My replacement bike was a $250 French make, with multiple gears, I had to wait a year for it due to shipping strikes. I kept it stored at Ohrt’s shop since there was no room at our apartment, and later, I sold it to pay the rent when a roommate skipped town early. I have never owned a bike since.”

Posted in cycle racing, Cycling, Jacquie Phelan

Oscar Juner, San Francisco Bicycle Icon

•December 15, 2007 • 16 Comments

Are you coming to Oscar Appreciation Day?” Ted White asked me as we rode the Winter Solstice Critical Mass ride eleven years ago. Ted is a cycling advocate and filmmaker. He rides to work, home again and on the weekends for fun. On the final Friday of the month, along with a couple thousand other pedalheads, we observe the Gathering of the Pneumatic wheeled, self-propelled Tribes. Ted has done almost everything one could hope to do on a bicycle, including visit China and crash ignominously in that city’s maelstrom of cycling. He is an original. Why he would want to watch Hollywood movie moguls celebrate another cheesy crop of popular cinema was beyond me. I declined, saying the Oscars are bogus, self-congratulating hype, even if the fashion parade is kind of fun.

“No! Oscar like in Oscar the six day racer” he groaned.

“Oh, yeah!” I clicked into a different gear, and recalled another San Francisco original.

Oscar Juner: the archetypical crusty ex-racer and mechanic who reigned supreme on San Francisco’s Bicycle Row, sharing his hoarded wisdom with generation after generation of neophyte mechanics and racers. Why, I’d even had the privilege of being intimidated by him in my Cheapskate Bike Commuter From Hell days. I’d wedge my Raleigh girl’s five speed in the the front door, and he’d look up, then silently resume working on some bike, way at the back of the long, skinny store. Terrified, mute and unaccustomed to the ways of Oscar, I didn’t return until I developed some nerve and a racing habit.

He was a fount of information, history, bike lore. But you had to get past the Curmudgeon. And if you’re a wimp (I was, but no am more) you might not get the time of day. But I bet if you were a kid with just the right kind of nagging presence, and the time to let Ol’ Oscar out of his shell, you’d be surprised at what you could learn.

Originally from New Jersey, Juner moved to the Bay Area in the thirties and opened American Cyclery in 1941 on the corner of Frederick and Stanyan streets, across from Ohrt’s Bike Shop. Half a dozen bicycle shops still cluster around the park’s fabled Haight St. entrance; back then twice as many had their own specific clientele. Ernst Ohrt ran a bicycle academy as a sideline, schooling neophyte women on balance and steering along Golden Gate Park’s quiet roads.

American Cyclery was where the “hammers” (biker word for fast rider) were forged. Oscar had a racer’s past and and legs that remembered racing. Hard core riders foolish enough to judge a man’s speed by his girth soon discovered his wicked, unbeatable sprint. At Oscar’s dim, cluttered shop, a racing scene was born. A guy could find rides to races, swap components, dissect the tactics in a flubbed race. You could get coaching if you were serious. Oscar’s protege’s sometimes made it to “big” national events— with Oscar at their side– and once in awhile they’d win, causing a ripple of curiosity among the East Coast cognoscenti. Back then, the east was the hub of cycling; California was presumed not to have cyclists (except as trophies on motorists’ walls).

As America’s love affair with the automobile turned into a blind obsession, serious road cyclists had to band together for warmth in the postwar cycling ice age. A competitive cyclist was considered quite an oddball, and the woolen togs didn’t help. Little wonder roadies still seem cliquish and conservative: tribes in a hostile universe have to behave that way to survive.

Oscar’s graduates convene at American Cyclery for a reunion each winter. New riders are welcome. Collectors come to excavate the legendary downstairs antiquities trove. Until Ted told me about it, I had no clue “Oscar Appreciation Day” existed. Bradley Woehl, the store’s current owner, carries on the tradition. To the guys who lived it, it’s oral history day. Until his death in 2002, Juner brought a pot of chili to the store, now resplendent after a thorough refurbishing by the new owner. Visitors bring beer offerings, and rub elbows with the likes of airline pilot Dan Kaljian, who first laced up his cleats in the mid-fifties, along with riders like Erich von Neff* (now a poet and longshoreman), the Best brothers, and Dave Marshall…as teenagers they would hang around Oscar’s for hours after a long ride. Their moms knew they could be found at the bike shop. If Oscar grew tired of them, he’d hurl a small wrench at their feet: visiting hours were over.

Vintage racers age remarkably well, like their machines. On the walls of the shop you’ll see old pictures of young riders balanced on a steeply tilted track. Underneath, in a tweed coat, one of those young men (now sporting silver hair) swaps stories with Bradley, who’s younger than his grandson. Chances are, the gentleman’s real grandson isn’t a bike fiend. Biker parents can’t impress cycling on their kids any more than biker kids can beg respect out of unimpressed parents.

If you read Hearts of Lions by Peter Nye, you’ll read about the history of bike racing in America, but you won’t find much about the SF scene. San Francisco Wheelmen was Oscar’s club, his baby. Another peninsula club, Pedali Alpini, captured Nye’s attention, and it’s up to someone else to document the amazing Oscar. One solitary fellow kept the bicycle culture’s flame burning in San Francisco for half a century… bridging the gap to the second Golden Age of the bicycle. Despite the lack of permanence in the bike scene (hardly any magazine is older than ten years), the individual members of the Tribe nevertheless manage to coalesce in a kind of virtual family, a family with the nonchalant stability seen in gyroscopes. Certainly none of the SF Wheelmen could have forseen the likes of Critical Mass ride in downtown San Francisco. Oscar, we are your spirit sons and daughters.

*Saxophoniste *

Il avait la peau noire et lisse
Il soufflait dans son saxophone
Tranquille, sensuel
Il attirait les femmes
Qui lentement
Faisaient onduler leurs hanches
En accord avec
Les sons bas et doux

* Devant chez Macy, Downtown San Francisco
dimanche 24 juillet 1983, 18 heures.

Erich Von NEFF

Posted in cycle racing, Jacquie Phelan, San Francisco
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Reasons 2 B Cheerful (Part II)

•December 9, 2007 • 9 Comments

Last chapter: While visiting the ‘new’ (15 year) owners of American Cyclery, I learned there was a vintage racer in the area, and decided to hunt her up since the address (but not the phone number) is listed.

Scene: a dreich San Francisco mid-day, high in the avenues overlooking the Doelger tract homes below and the fine wide ocean.

Noriega Street develops a serious wiggle owing to the hills. Very different from flats carefully laid out below in a grid (built on sand dunes).

Mr Doelger “forgot” to include parks.
San Francisco bike legend Oscar J’s first wife, Gay, supposedly lives in this three-story peach colored house.
I’m sweaty through and through, wearing a rainsoaked pink Anne Taylor jacket picked out of a free box about five minutes earlier…because it almost fits, and looks faintly professional.

After knocking and waiting, and ringing and waiting some more, I ask myself what I’m doing here, in a stranger’s doorway.

A) Is it because Brad Woehl suggested I might enjoy meeting a real legend?
B) to find out if she’s still alive?
C) to do a quick interview?
D) because I’m impulsive, curious, and itching for adventure?

An ancient, bent woman opened the door about four inches and looked sideways up at me.
“Who is it?.”
“I’m a bike racer, too. I wonder if I can come in?!” I yelled.

‘Come in. I’m a little disabled” she said lamely, shuffling –unaided– toward the stairway with double railings. I waited and admired her upward progress.

A thought occured to me: maybe stair-climbing isn’t the worst thing in the world for old people. Charlie’s mom lives in a five story house, and she’s incredibly ept. Er, mobile.
We get to the main upper room a very tidy living room/dining room suite, with TV in front of a big black plastic couch, coffee table and the rug just where she sits is threadbare, as if she walks in place there.

Four boxes of chocolate on the table, along with a clock that announces the hour in a mechanical voice (“ONE O’CLOCK”). A few knicknacks as well. And two cats watch from their perches.

“I hope this is an OK time…”
“What?”
“I HOPE I’M NOT INTRUDING”.
“Oh, no, not at all. I am just relaxing”.
“IS IT TRUE YOU WERE A CHAMPION?”
Might as well get down to it.
“Yes, a long time ago”.
“AND WON THIRTEEN RACES IN A ROW?”
“Yes”.
“BRAD HAS THE BIKE IN HIS SHOP. THE CHROME PLATED ONE…”
“I see….”

She tells me that her 17 years with Oscar were the best in her life, she’d met him when she was 24 and he 21…he taught her how to ride, and trained her…and they married the next year (1935 or so). He was so young looking the magistrate insisted on a birth certificate which had to be mailed out….

“I don’t have any regrets” she said.
Long pause.
“I barely remember why I…left….it’s the biggest mistake I ever made, because I am still in love with him, even though he’s gone”.

(Oscar died four years ago).

“CAN I SEE YOUR PHOTO ALBUM?”

A heavy old album appeared from under the coffee table; in it, only about ten racing photos, of them four are her as a twenty-five yr old and older, in her leather crash hat, circling a track, riding on the road, both times in the lead with two other women behind.

If I knew how to look at bikes, I’d notice cool stuff but reader, I don’t notice bikes. They had cool handlebar bends, and looked…simple. The shorts were cut incredibly high, unlike now.
Very white legs. No ripped, defined muscles, but strong legs nonetheless….

“WHAT DID YOU DO FOR WORK?”
“I owned a restaurant at fourth and Mission, Gay & Irene’s’, for twelve years. Hard work. We bought this house when it was new.”

“DID YOU RIDE YOUR BIKE TO THE RESTAURANT?”
“No, I used public transportation…I don’t drive”.
(Inner cheer from me)
“DID THE OTHER LADIES HATE YOU FOR WINNING ALL THE TIME?”
(Now, now, no need to project your own issues on this nice lady).
“No, we had camaraderie, no hard feelings. There weren’t a lot of us. My highest placing was a second at the Nationals in Wisconsin..”

After learning that her jersies, medals, etc. live in a box somewhere in the junk-packed garage, and that her right-hand man Jose would have to find them, I implored her to ask him to do some archaeology for me…

“HERE’S MY CARD (give her the rock-shox card, never thinking it could possibly be rather strong medicine for am elderly woman, let alone her Hispanic aide-de-camp), I’LL WRITE HIM A NOTE”.
“No need. I’ll remember”.
We sit for a couple minutes without a word.
For me this is incredibly hard. But there is something to be said (! wrong word choice) for shutting up, letting the moment just sit there.
And stay where it’s put.

Until…

“CAN I HAVE ONE OF THESE?”
“What, the chocolate? Of course, help yourself”
I am already starved despite my breakfast at a diner over by State U.
“GUESS I SHOULD GO. I’LL BE BACK WITH MY CAMERA. CAN I HAVE YOUR PHONE NUMBER?”

I leave, but halfway out the door, I realize I hadn’t asked..
Run back up the steps two at a time, bucking helmet.
“WHAT’S YOUR BIRTHDAY?”
“September 19th, 1909”.
“THANKS, GAY. SEE YA!”

Race downstairs, and hop aboard my trusty Breezer town bike…calculating 98 years…still clear in her head…
–can’t see much at all but “listens to TV’
..enjoys “bein’ lazy”
–devoted to her cats.
–No physical pain (I’d asked).
–Makes her own meals: one day, tv dinner, next day real food.
–Has a couple of people who check in
–She would never accept living in one of those ‘assisted living’ places…

“I’m content with what I have, but when Benjy cat died last month, part of me died with him”.

When I get back to SF I’ll snap a pic and throw it up on the big black blog background for you all to see.

We have a hero in our mist.

Posted in Alice B. Toeclips, Cycle Training, Cycling, Jacquie Phelan

Reasons 2 B Cheerful (Part I)

•December 7, 2007 • 2 Comments

gay-juner-for-blog-1.jpggay-juner-trophy.jpg

A doctor checkup is seldom a great reason to leap out of bed.

Rain isn’t fun, when it’s the first rain of the year, lifting oil off streets so you can crash more easily, etc…and thirty miles to the doctor is ridiculous, specially a nine a.m. appointment. When you have to have fasted for 12 hours beforehand.

This is what neighbors with 2 ton diesel trucks are for. They DAILY drive twice that distance (passing doctor’s office) so…leapt out of bed and we drive.

With Breezer bike in back. It’s five a.m. and there is already heavy traffic going to the Big City.

This is 20% of my lovely neighbor’s life…daren’t show him the great You Tube commercial for biking…

Dreich day in town, with rain lightly falling.

6 a.m, three hours to explore SF’s southern end, pitch black. Gee, after about 5 minutes I need to get warm. Found a tiny hole-in-the wall Scarbucks a couple miles away in lovely Portal neighborhood, got the best banquette seat, bought a $1.45 peppermint tea to warm up and permit a lengthy sit.

When I looked up, the once empty hole-in-wall was packed, and laptops glowing. Click click sounds punctuated by those painful cappucino percussions of the metal thing getting emptied. Bodies in line, all wearing interesting shoes (mostly pointy-scary, stylish, great for podiatry biz).
Oh, for a TEA ROOM.

With Stephen Colbert’s hilarious I am America (And So Can You!) for company the 3 hrs were up, an’ I zoomed off to get a health-check.

An hour later, I’m blabbling with the doc who is in his understated way, admiring my blood work-up results, my flexibility, etc.. I modestly rearrange my unassuming air.

“But I see you have had cancer” he continues.
I shrug. “We’re all in the one-in-five lottery–It’s the price for living in nirvana.”
“It’s shockingly high rate. But…” he hesitated. “Nice place, Fairfax. I play each year at that place up the hill in a healthcare golf tournament”
“Indeed. You don’t suppose those chemicals flowing downstream from golf courses might…?”

Meadow Club sits above our drinking water (Alpine Lake, where I shot the mud pix).

Rode to a nearby cafe to have breakfast with bike pals Greta Snider and John Kiffmeyer.

John mentions he has STOPPED trying to get people to like him, and he’s had the best year of his life.
“Well, duh!” I bark.
“All that wasted energy now plowed back into your own work, you don’t have to worry about scaring people with your brilliance, youthful beauty, AND musicality…so you can let er rip…am i right?!”
“That’s it exactly. besides, what if I am ‘better’?”
“And I don’t hide the rock n roll thing” he adds…(he was a founder of Green Day)..” so like, I can say something like ya, I have a gold record .. they just issue them everytime a million sales happen whether or not you’re still in the band cuz if the old record hits that number, you get that thing, they send you five so you can give your mom one, your drum shop one, etc…

I am agog. I knew he’d quit music early to go to Humboldt State to get eddycated.

ANY HOW, huge fun hearing about GS’s amazing students, what projects they are working on (her seminar is Using Film as Tool for Social Change). Then I’ve got all day to make it back to Marin. But my ‘family’ would be so depressed to hear I was in town and didn’t pay a call.

Stop #1: American Cyclery, where Bradley Woehl welcomes me like a brother. Show off calendar, admire his downstairs treasure trove: scrapbooks, antique mags, pix, headbadges oh god they were pretty, even the crusty ones…San Francisco framebuilders of the old days…

And then he showed me a chrome-plated bike, Oscar’s first wife’s bike. Oscar was the shop owner, a crusty ol’ six-day racer..”this bike won 13 district championships in a row” he told me. “The lady’s 93 years old, sharp as a tack..”

I got very excited…

“Where does she live now?” Tyson, Brad’s right hand man had the answer on Zaba search, which I grab and commence a ten minute straight uphill pedal.

En route, I spy a pink jacket lying on top of a heap in a dumpster, put it on, ( (WET!!) Nice retro but professional looking linen/silk/wool blend, tres Jackie Kennedy…

Came to the house, a homely three story modern, built into hill…rang bell. Three hours later, ok, maybe five minutes later, I hear a weak voice.
“Who is it?”.
(2 V continued.)

Posted in Alice B. Toeclips, cycle racing, Cycling, San Francisco

Santa Cruisin’ for a bruisin’

•December 2, 2007 • 2 Comments

Our annual Santa Cruise ride was successful. Since 1983, the first Saturday of December is given over to raise cash for women bruised not by themselves on their bikes but by their partners…

I had the usual trouble getting down to Santa Cruz: when i drive I doze within a half an hour, and despite the freezing temperature outside, I drifted off to zzland in the middle of heavyish San Francisco traffic. My co-pilot Heather C. took over and we were down by 9:30, only half an hour late.

“Why down in Santa Cruz?” people wonder.
“The pun! See how there is that two word possibility between ‘Cruz’ and ‘Cruise’?
I could see a Santa Rat on a fat tire bike , in fact I drew one and put it on a tee shirt the first few years…”

And STILL HAVE THE RUBBER STAMP (available for a mere 10 clams plus postage).

There were a dozen people milling about at the Forest Of Nisene Marks unofficial mud pit parking lot (now surrounded with cyclone fence, and a sad little toy armchair foundered in the shallow puddle like a drowned set property of a Katrina drama).

We pulled out bikes, and the other Marinites arrived and off we went, fingers frozen to handlebars.

The deep wooded ravine breathed foggily into our clothes and I re-learned how this ride plunges at first, then goes flat, then re-plunges to creek level and at last begins to climb the old narrow gauge Loma Prieta railroad bed (ties still in place here & there).

The fog piled in swiftly overhead, the narrow slot of sky was soon gray and I felt a few lone drops of rain, only on my eyelash. Just one, then another five minutes later.

Half the climb I had company and chatted away. The other half I let myself ride into fantasyland since the smooth, duff-upholstered roadbed begs to be ignored and unfeared.

Pretty soon I realized I wasn’t in California at all, and force-marched myself back into the Moment, to study major yellow palmate leafage from Acer macrophylla or is it macrofolia?
patterning the forest floor in thick crunchy curls, and paving the road bed in flat velvet palmprints.

The forest primeval was long gone, but this regrowth could fool a postmodern and did fool this one.
I was Evangeline
I was Puck on a bike
I was one lucky very un-battered (except by self) woman biking a ritual begun in 1983 to remember a non-survivor in the family warfare. Somehow I feared Mom would be paved over by time if I didn’t take some sort of action.

Up at the scenic overlook we intuited virga (rain that doesn’t reach ground) off in the distance, ate snacks, swung feet from benches which are becoming taller cuz the dirt underneath is getting scraped away…leaving everyone resembling a six year old.

Yakked about every little thing.
Were silent 1/10 the time
Happy the whole time.
And then spree’d downhill, me without my helmet.

At the sight of a bit of twisted green velvety Goldsworthy left-overs, I sprang into action and got some images of myself as the forest sprite from the Bent Twig Clan.

A long, gradual downhill, the Loma Prieta rail line swoops down without loose rocks and only a few soft roots reach across the road.. this surface lets one be a dreamer, and the revisit daydreams of previous rides .

There was the time Paul Sadoff told me of his upcoming wedding; what a feeling I got from hearing great news while flying at warp speed. MY warp speed. That’s right. Half of your warp speed. (Boy/girl exchange rate unfavorable at this time).

Then the time I first noticed the “japanese garden” (a huge road cut gone soft, twenty feet high, covered with moss). I was riding alone then. One sees more comme ca. Remember: it seems fast to me.

Aggregate memories disembed from the topography as I thunder by. This is reassuring, because I can then count on having a reasonable Place Memory when I return to some remote spot, with this shaky narrative memory. All I have to do is get on my bike and flow around the town, the river, the mountain and it will all come back because it was buried there the first time.

Then I recalled an alternate route threading alng the creekside high high above it, dodging redwood, maidenhair and sword fern, toyon and every other native plant that this particular morning was now outlined in pure clear silver light owing to the angle of the sun.

Positively giddy from a non-stop 45 minute descent, I zombied over to the parking lot where pot after pot of tea (THANK YOU CORA, and thank you TEA TABLE) re-calibrated our core temperatures.

Cora bustled about and after we few fat tire riders were tucking into the bread, cheese, jam, hummus, more cheese, peanut butter and sesame crunchies, then and only then did Cora present Laura, the representative from Women’s Crisis Support with a stunning orange commute Schwinn in pristine condition from the 1970’s…with a new basket on the front, and brand new bars, grips, and of course overhauled drive train, maybe even new wheels!

Picture to follow.

Then the road grouplets straggled in, more feeding frenzy, while in the background, the fastest joggers I’ve ever seen (there’s an Soquel track club doing winter run in the park) streaked by. It grew late, and we rolled out, having accumulated over $1,000 in checks for the charity.

Posted in Calendar, Charlie Cunningham, Cycling, Jacquie Phelan, Naked mud, Trees

Thank you FELLOWNEWS!!

•December 1, 2007 • Leave a Comment

I am flabbergasted at the sensation of pulling g’s on the internet.
Velonews made my blog their ‘site of the day’ on November 30hth. My small blog with three dozen diehard friends/readers morphed into today’s cool thing, grabbing 6,300. Wow. That was too easy. Can’t wait til I’m unpopular again, there will be less pressure (plus I won’t have to “check” to see the blog stats skyrocket).

Ten years after my column, LIFE IN THE FAT LANE (Bike Magazine) got the axe I find myself still writing in thousand-word chunks. I have perspective now, and I bet I was canned because I laughed at car advertising.

For whatever reason, I dropped out of the scene, and wrote my friends only. I used a “Glob” which is better than a blog because it LANDS ON YOUR DOORSTEP…and sticks! Sort of a snotty sounding analogy, huh. No hunting around in distraction-laden cyber-space.
Just me and my mind…in their (er, your) mailbox!!!

SO clever, right?

Except that my server started viewing my unwieldy 200 people “Knobby Nobility A-List” as spam.

THE NERVE!

My subjects need regular directives from their monarch. Jeez.

So then I hacked it into about four grouplets (duchys, if you will) and the Glob made it down the gullet past the gatekeeper Spamprevention Posse.

For two or three years I wrote globs monthly, well, sometimes less, but anyway that very personal letter to my favorite 200 people (among them Kip Mikler and Charles Pelkey and Art Read and Charlie Kelly and damn few women, ok Holly Harris, Judie Scalfano, Susan DeMattei..)

I even had reunions, yes I did.

“The Return of the 80’s Ladies” in 1998. Two days at West Point Inn, twenty two of us…many hadn’t seen one another in YEARS!!

Then I had to do the same for the boys, since it was them I was duking it out with (sorry, bad pun) I produced Retroriders Reunions 1 & 2 (at Taylor Made Farm, and Tim Fox’s place on the Russian River), plus Whiskeytown revisited, Rockhopper Revisited. Buncha gray hairs in stupendous shape. I started attending George Mount’s ‘dino ride’ (roadies of yore, true dinosaurs).

You’d think I’d forgotten to get a life! How wrong you might be. (Jury not yet re-convened)

Some of us just have to tend and defend those delicate lines of commun(ity)cation because er,
well, because some of us think they are important, even more important than a paycheck.

It is hard if you have a short attn’ span, to send four times a letter to four sets of dukes, earls, dauphines and princesses. So the idea of a blog took root. Chip, thank you for the nudge.

And Chris Hill thank you for muscling THIS into being. And SeeKay? You were right.
And Velonews even seems to like it, what’s not to love?

So I am just going to smile myself ta sleep.

Til tomorrow, pinch me, I’m dreaming.

Posted in Alice B. Toeclips, Cycle Training, Cycling, insomnia

Nostra Donna Del Fango/MUD LIFE CRISIS Calendar 2008

•November 30, 2007 • 7 Comments

calendar.jpg

Now available!Did you faithful reader riders hope to escape crassmas commercialism in this sacred space?Augh! Please shield the children’s eyes here, mum. I have a filthy mud-caked bit of artwork for the rest of the whole family.Thanks to cycle blog wiz Chris H of Edenbourg I learned of a place that can turn an idea that’s been brewing for a decade (basically since I wanted to do another mud shoot) but lacked the neccessary know-how to click a camera, make a publication, etc, in other words I had to GROW UP a little more to bring the Fruits of Maturity to bear on this vanity project.I think you’ll agree this is pure mudlife crisis-solving through displacement activity. With your help of course! Click here you can decide for yourself and LOG YOUR OPINION here under this post!!Once in, if you click the button that says “Preview” somewhere on the Lulu page and you can see 12 pictures of a certain middle aged wombat who’s been mucking about in the mud. With really silly names like “Carmen DeNominator” and “Gloria Stitz” etc…Here, I’ll read my own deathless press release: Twelve images of the legendary offroad bicycle champion Jacquie Phelan–napped in mud. Anne Cutler’s stunning infrared photography echoes the grace and earthiness of a RockShox photo (by Jan Oswald) fourteen years earlier. “Fango” pictures were taken in a single autumn afternoon in Marin County, 2007. Cutler’s 2008 book “Treecycle” showcases natural beauty normally hidden from human view, since we don’t see into the infrared range like insects do. Lake mud does wonders for the skin, dunnit?

Posted in Alice B. Toeclips, Calendar, infrared, Jacquie Phelan, Naked mud, WOMBATS

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