On Broken Bikes

Hello family.

The picture to the left is of my husband Jay, who only some of you have met, on a bike trip he took with a group of guy friends at the end of July. Jay was unofficially promoted last fall from a software tester to a manager of software testers and since then has been averaging 60 hours a week of work. These extra nights and weekends of work have taken their toll on our family both emotionally and increasingly physically. On the much anticipated bike trip pictured to the left, Jay's bike broke in half about five miles into a fifteen mile ride. It seemed like a horrible, freak accident but for awhile, at least, we thought Giant would honor the warranty on his frame and we would be able to fix the bike without spending too much money.

Yesterday, Jay was given the afternoon off of work in exchange for having worked until 1:30 AM the previous night. He decided to borrow my mountain bike and go for a ride. He packed the car, changed into his biking clothes, put the bike on the roof rack and started on his way when he realized that he had left his shoes at home. He returned to our house and pulled into the garage, remembering too late that the bike was still on top of the car. The result can be seen to the right. My bike, broken in exactly the same place as his. So now we have two broken mountain bikes, a broken roof rack, a dented car and a scratched garage.

Any time material things break, I remind myself of the Anne Lamott quotation, "If it is a problem that can be solved by throwing money at it, it isn't that much of a problem." But yesterday it did feel like a problem. It felt like, if Jay's work hadn't expected him to work 60 hours a week, he wouldn't be so stressed out that he would forget the bike was on top of the car or if they would just make his promotion official (along with the official pay bump we've been waiting for), replacing the bike frames wouldn't feel like such a major expense. Or if the bike shop had tried to advocate for us at all, we might get at least one frame replaced under warranty.

As the person who manages the money for our family, the prospect of deciding when we can spend money on bike parts is challenging. Jay trusts me to tell him when there is and isn't money but it's never as simple as that. He's the one who works 60 hours a week, I work 35, less if I can get away with it. He rarely spends money and so when he does want to buy something it is hard for me to say no. Not to mention the complicated mixture of guilt and anxiety I feel about my admittedly middle class concerns about spending money on bike parts when our economy is crashing down around us and so many people are choosing between groceries and the power bill.

I wish I had the essayists skill to pull a kernel of life wisdom from these reflections, but that truth is that this year has been full of these moments--our basement keeps flooding, we wrecked our new car within months of having purchased it, every time we schedule a camping trip it rains. It's been full of other moments as well--Grandma's memorial service, a week in Michigan with the Linder side of the family, seeing my stepdaughter, Alina, perform on stage at the Chicago Metro, moments of humor and grace in my classroom--we are healthy and happy more days then not.

In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, the Trafalmadorians encourage Earthlings to focus on the good moments and ignore the bad. I always tell my students that Vonnegut is describing the way we already live, not proscribing a better way of life. I strongly believe that we have to see the world for all its good and bad. But how to live in such a way that the bad moments, and their accompanying despair, don't eclipse the light?