Oh! What a Smile!

Riding is often the highlight of an otherwise uneventful day, and especially this winter I’ve been enjoying my rides with maximum pleasure in knowing that I’m beating the weather at its own game and riding my ass off in December, January, and February, months during which I’m sometimes grounded for many weeks on end with snow and ice on the ground.  While I always enjoy my rides, I’ve had some of the very best lately, not because I’ve gone anywhere significantly grand, but simply because I’m getting time in on the bike that I wouldn’t normally get.

Now when I’m out there on two wheels, I’m just about in the happiest mood I’m in for a day. There’s something exhilarating about any ride, even if it’s just around the corner to drop something off at my Mom’s or to cruise mindlessly about the neighborhood for the sake of being out on the scooter.  I often imagine that drivers who are going past me in the opposite direction are envious of the joyful look on my face because I’m sure that my grin is always lighting up what might already be a day full of sunshine.

Because of that amazing happiness, joy, glee, or whatever it might best be called I’ve always imagined my face when I’m out on the scooter to be beaming with a huge smile.  I can feel my smile muscles tightening sometimes so much that all I can think of is my mom saying, “If you keep making that face it’s going to stay that way.” In the case of a scooter smile, though, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.  Or so I thought when I decided to mount the newest camera in my arsenal on the windshield of the scooter where it would snap a picture of my delightful smile every 30 seconds.

When I get to the end of my street and hang a left I’m immediately at the beginning of a wooded stretch of road that connects my city with the next town.  Although it’s posted at 25 mph, most cars take it at around 45 mph, although occasional scooter riders have been known to do it at 65 or better because it’s a bit like a quick ride on a roller coaster with a few twists and a couple of dips and rises as it meanders through the woods and back into civilization about three quarters of a mile later.  Surely the grin would be from ear to ear on my face as I made my way through there.

 Guess again.  The camera suggested that perhaps I’d lost my best friend rather than have started out on a day that allowed me to enjoy my ride in only a light jacket.

A little ways up takes me past the street on which my best friend lived when we were in high school, and onto which I made a left turn thousands of times between ’72 and ’76.  He lives in Boston now, but hardly a day goes by when we don’t share some of the details of our days with each other in an e-mail or two. Surely my face would be lit up like a veritable Christmas tree while passing there!  Nope.  I looked like a damned funeral director with that somewhat sympathetic yet stoic face that each of them must practice in a mirror for at least an hour a day.

Now, mind you, as I rode and knew that the camera was dutifully capturing my smiles I was extra conscious of the look on my face and was deliberately giving it that shit eating grin that I’m always convinced is on my face when I’m riding.  I have no idea why the camera was doing such a lousy job of capturing my joie de vivre, but it wasn’t even coming close.  

 The longer and farther I rode the happier I was in thinking of the light hearted post that was going to come from those pictures showing my 1,000 watt smiles.  With no view finder or screen on the camera itself there was no way of stopping on occasion to see just how much of my happiness was showing, so on I rode just grinning all the way because I was enjoying myself to the max and giving what I just knew were my very best smiles to the camera.

Dear heavens!  A scowl even appeared to be on my face at times.  How could my smiling muscles be betraying me so much?

 

All I can think by way of explanation for why EVERY single one of the pictures of my face show me as less than thrilled is that the seriousness of being hyper attentive to my surroundings – the condition of the road, the actions of other drives, the movements of other vehicles around me, potential obstacles in my path – is on my face more than the fun I’m feeling.  And if that’s the case, it’s not so bad.  I’d rather know that I’m taking the serious precautions that need to be taken when one isn’t in the protective covering afforded by a car and is much more vulnerable to the effects of any accident that might be just around the next corner, cause I’d rather get back from my ride with a miserable puss than to die with a big smile on my face that won’t necessarily be a sure ticket at the pearly gates.

How I Spent My "Extra Day"

I’d say that I only ride on this date every four years, today’s being Leap Day, the 29^th of February in 2016 whose number is perfectly divisible by four - except for years which are both divisible by 100 and not divisible by 400 – but it wouldn’t necessarily be true because I could probably safely bet that weather-wise this is the first 29^th of February on which I’ve been able to ride since I began scootering in 2007.

  No winter here, folks.  The gates to the park are wide open and have been through the entire season during which they’d usually be locked up tight.

Come to think of it, this has been a winter that kind of wasn’t, and that is NOT to be taken as any sort of lament.  I live in Pennsylvania because that’s where I was born and raised and as a total creature of habit it’s where I’m destined to stay, but if I were more adventurous, wealthy, and more inclined to change things simply for the sake of changing them I’d move to a place where snow is a rare delight and then only as long as it hangs merrily in the air but never hits the ground.

I never get tired of visiting this simple park which gives one a magnificent view all the way across to the other side of the valley.  This picture and the one below are taken from exactly the same vantage point on the scooter, but in the second I pulled in the camera’s zoom tightly to make the windmills on the mountain that form the opposite valley wall seem like they’re right in front of me.

  If you’ve been here before you might have read about the gates to the county park which to me usually symbolize the start of winter, when they usually get closed and locked up, and the heralding of spring, when they usually get unlocked and opened.  This year, though, they were never closed, and never locked, and I didn’t (yet, pausing to knock on wood) have to take out the snow blower except to test it in November and barely needed to man a shovel.  It’s been way too big a thrill for me to ride through those gates every time I’ve checked them and found them wide open since the beginning of December!

It’s indescribably great to be out on the 29th of February soaking up a warm sunshine that’s making my spirit dance.  And that’s because my spirit, which isn’t corporeal, is the only part of me that could possibly dance with any degree of grace, and that’s only hypothetical.

 The buds are starting to open on the pussy willow that grows alongside my deck and the wild chives are already thickening the lawn at the far end where they pop up every year around this time.  I’m thinking in another week or two I might see some crocuses and narcissuses (I think that’s what they call the baby daffodils that grow around here.) poking up in the side garden.

Although I needed the hat and the thick leather riding gloves because the wind chill was taking the delightful temperature of the sun down a few ambient degrees, I was warm enough for the ride to be totally pleasant from start to finish.

So, with all this excitement of what appears to have all the makings of an early spring, you bet that I was out on the scooter this afternoon!  And what joy I was feeling as I practically flew across the roads though light traffic that beat the evening rush with a song in my heart and a Leprechaun’s early gleam in my eye.

My reflection wasn’t quite in focus in the large plate glass panel outside a local store, but the day was as clear as one might be.  It would have been a great day to be up in a plane soaring over the valley as I’ve done a few times taking off and landing from a spot not far from where this picture was taken.

  
My birthday is in a few weeks and I recall a year when there was one of the biggest blizzards this area has seen in my lifetime that spanned from two days before my birthday right through it into the next morning and which gave us a four day spring vacation from school (that had to be made up in June).  And there was another blizzard in early April on the evening of my parents’ wedding day that had their bus hung up on their way to New York City for their honeymoon, so we can’t count on being out of the worst of what winter might dish up just yet.  But I am hoping with every fiber of my being that there won’t be any more harshness of weather before spring is here in full force.

The Off Season - Installment 02 - Another New Phone

I have written here a number of times in the past about my cellular telephones not because I consider such pieces to be terribly informative, but simply because I come to have a personal relationship with my cell phones that’s probably weird, odd, and maybe even a little unhealthy in that if I happen to leave the house without my phone I don’t feel only anxiously cut off from the rest of the world, but almost feel as if I’m walking around in public naked. 

 

The phone wasn’t much of an important part of my life as a kid.  It sat on the buffet in the dining room in the home in which I grew up, that lonely black spectacle of “modern communications” in the early 60’s, and everybody’s phone looked the same back then.  It took virtually forever to dial on the rotary wheel, and God forbid anybody’s number had a zero in it because that full whirl forward with one’s finger in the zero hole and the complete orbit backward added a seeming infinite amount of time on to making a call.  And when it rang?  Those twin bells could have awakened the dead with their piercing blare that might have had you think you were in a firehouse with the alarm bell going off!

One size fits all - the traditional black rotary phone. This one, like millions of others when I was growing up, was the only phone on the block. It was rented from the telephone company on a monthly basis - THE telephone company monopoly.

There was a time in my life when I was a young adult when I was driven crazy by a ringing telephone that I couldn’t answer in time.  I don’t know what I was thinking but a missed call to me was a horrible thing as if I’d been expecting news that I’d won a billion dollar lottery.  So much so did I hate unanswered calls that when an old wall phone became available to me I mounted it right next to the toilet in the apartment I lived in at the time.  Now, with caller I.D., if somebody’s calling and I don’t know who it is, I don’t even bother answering and let the machine pick it up unless I’m in the mood to mess with somebody and answer it for the simple sake of giving a very hard time to the calling party for infringing on my DO NOT CALL LIST status.

 

The Atrix, on the right, on the first day that I got it, beside "The Brick" which I'd carried for many years . Oh, how shiny it was, and how happy it made me. It was my very first smart phone.

But, enough background (i.e., stuff to write to make the post longer because I’m a wordy person according to those who know and love me the most).  A few days ago my beloved Motorola Atrix HD which I’d had since August of 2012 and which had been slowing down to the point of having to wait minutes at times for one app to give way to another, seemingly coughed one of its very last breaths.  A reboot (which I’d hoped would be like giving it CPR) froze it at the AT&T globe display from which it would not go forward.  Fifteen tries to do a virtual battery pull by holding down the volume down button and the on button simultaneously finally got it to come up one final time, giving me just enough “life” for me to race to the AT&T store and have its data transferred to a new phone.  Once that was complete I shut it down for the final time and have felt like I killed a friend ever since.  It sits, dead, on the side of my desk and the thought of throwing it in the garbage horrifies me.  I keep thinking it can be saved, somehow, but why?  I already replaced it.

 The poor Atrix next to his replacement, the Motorola Moto-E. Yep, I've been as faithful to my Motorola phones as they've been to me.

The new phone, like all of its Android buddies running the Lollipop operating system, is missing one HUGE feature that I loved on my old phone.  When I’m on the scooter with the bluetooth headset on, it can’t answer automatically.  That’s going to be a problem for me when I’m expecting a call because I’d come to rely on the auto-answer feature heavily when riding.  It’s not easy around here (with many roads that don’t have a shoulder that’s safe to stop on) to pull over, reach up into the helmet, and press a button on the side of the bluetooth headset.  And there isn’t a cell phone holder that can mount easily anywhere on the BV that I’d trust not to eject the phone when I’m practically losing the front tire in one of Pennsylvania’s mighty potholes.  I’m not as bad about missing a call as I was when I had the phone next to the crapper, but there are some calls I’d rather not miss so I can foresee times when I might stay home for fear of missing a call I’m expecting rather than to be on the road with the bike when it comes through.

New, and shiny, the Moto-E sits around waiting to get some calls, although on the weekend that's less likely to happen. He might have to wait another two days to get a little use.

Now, what to do about that beloved old Atrix?  The new one just doesn't feel like somebody to me yet, and there sits the dead one staring up at me like a betrayed companion.  Sigh!

No, I'm not writing ransom notes with different fonts.  The Blogger interface leaves a lot of room for improvement when it comes to changing fonts on the fly, and what comes out after publication sometimes little resembles what was on the screen prior to publishing.