Coasting is Child’s Play

Some years ago, I had a next-door neighbor who dying of congestive heart failure. She was a single mother with two young boys. The older boy was six and didn't have a bicycle of his own, so every day for one whole month, he swept my patio and watered the flower pots to earn money to buy a bike we had seen at the local bike shop. From then until his mother died when he was 13, we rode our bikes around town several times a week. This was in the wine country of the San Francisco Bay Area where the weather is conducive to bike-riding almost year-round.

Today, I was telling a 50-something-year-old friend about this boy, who inherited his mother's heart disease and is having surgery tomorrow to insert a pace-maker and defibrillator under his 18-year-old skin. When I told my friend that this boy and I used to play a game called "see how far you can go without pedaling," he said that he – my grown-up friend — plays that game, too. But it's not at all an easy game, and I found that hard to believe, so I asked him, exactly what he meant. He said that when he rides his bike home from a certain friend's house he sees how far he can get without pedaling. He said it had taken him some time, but that he had finally found a route where he could "coast" all the way home – over two miles.

But I wasn't talking about "coasting;" I was talking about "without pedaling." For us the game was neither so simple nor so pedestrian as "see how far you can coast." Our game, I explained to my friend, was complicated. The rules varied with the day and who was dictating them, but on a given occasion "without pedaling" could mean:

Go as far as you can without pedaling and while standing up on one leg and sticking the other leg out straight behind you with your foot flexed and turned parallel to the ground and keeping one hand off the handle bars while singing the words from that cat food jingle to the tune of "rock-a-bye baby in the tree top" and coughing once every time you come to one of those seams in the concrete.

Or:

Go as far as you can without pedaling and while standing on one leg with your other knee up on the seat and using your right hand to drag this willow branch along the ground behind your bike and smashing at least five of those stinky seed-head things with your front tire before you get to the end of the street.

There was a "pedal as few times as you can" variation of the game.

Thus:

"Pedal as few times as you can between Kitty Corner (so-called because you always had to ride kitty-corner across the intersection to a drain grate where feral cats lived under the street) and the post office and multiply the pedal strokes by two every time you start to lose your balance, and subtract three every time you run over a crack in the blacktop but only if the crack has grass growing in it.

The kind of "coasting" my neighbor brags about, you see, is mere child's play.