Hot Shot
I was flying!
I mean, when I ride the bicycle, I fly. My heart's a pumping, my lungs are working like bellows, my legs are just short of paining, and my knees have a moment or two before failure.
It would take a Jack Armstrong to catch me. (For all you youngsters under 55 out there, I'll use Lance Armstrong instead.)
Then, in my mirror, I see a bike rider edging up on me. Now, it's just me out there taking my daily exercise ride. Not a race. Even still, I have an aversion to people doing something better than I am doing it. I don't mind so much if it's a professional, or a young buck athlete (if it happens to be something physical that I'm doing). But when it's some show-offy, run-of-the-mill person, I get competitive.
(Of course I'm not a show-off. I'm just casually minding my own affairs. Not like them.)
Now I can see the bicycle closing in on me fast. My legs can't go any faster, so it's up to my mind to start doing it's job by justifying my situation.
"It's a young buck," my mind says. "Probably training for some marathon or somethin'."
Now the bike rider is close enough that I can see that it's no youngster.
"Probably riding one of those new-fangled racing bikes, not an old fat wheeled clunker like mine."
Sounds good. I'll buy that one.
"Good morning!" the 80+ year old man says as he flies by me, in a strong, hardly breathing voice. And on a fat tired old clunker almost like my own.
"Why couldn't he have turned off before reaching me," my mind says. "That way I could have continued believing what I had been thinking earlier."
Darn, show-offy old men anyway.
What made me think of this today, was not an old man, but a small grade-school kid that flew by me on an old single gear sting ray type bike.
Show-offy little kids anyway.
It's times like these when I start feeling my age.
Tumbleweed
