tfdl

To say the weather was bleak at the bus stop last night is a disservice to the word bleak. What is bleaker than bleak? Siberian? Whichever the apt word is, that is how it was standing on the corner of Germantown Avenue and Mt. Pleasant Street in Mount Airy waiting for the 23 Bus. Maybe it was the 19-degree temperature. Or it could have been the freezing rain. Or perhaps it was the wind. It might have been the 1-degree wind chill. I don’t know. What I do know now is the rather pleasant sound of power lines literally frozen stiff as they hummed like steel cables. It even sounded cold.

And then…
A bicyclist appeared across the street coming in my direction. As he passed, I smiled and said, “Balmy evening, isn’t it?” He stopped and smiled back and said, “This isn’t the coldest I've ever been.”
“Where was that?”
“Bismarck, North Dakota in the middle of winter”, he replied still smiling.
And so we began to chat.
He was dressed in a tight fitting orange down parka, black winter bicycle pants, several pairs of heavy socks and boots. His helmet was a bit of an oddity, though. It was black and white – looked more like a policeman’s motorcycle helmet than a bicyclist’s, with one minor alteration. On the top was a blinking light sitting atop a spindle-like device, so that the light arced back and forth. No way one of those aggressive Philadelphia drivers would miss seeing him!
Looking at his bike told me that his was a serious rider. He had an old steel framed Peugeot. I haven’t seen one of those in quite a while. (You can see one here, though.) He said he had been riding it for about twenty years.
He then pointed to his pack on the back of his bike, and said, “I’ve been keeping a log, and I have ridden 240,000 miles. Some years I rode 9,000 and sometimes 10,000 miles.”
“When did you start the log?” I asked.
“In February 1974.”
And then I looked closer at his face. “Can I ask you how old you are?”
“Seventy-four. My mother is ninety-five, but she is wearing out her warranty. I expect to live to be one hundred fifteen… no, one hundred eighteen.” He never stopped smiling.

We spoke some more about microbiology and macrobiotic diets and how there was someone even more important in France than Louis Pasteur who was a contemporary of his but whose name I never heard of who had a whole different take on biology and keeping food safe and how Pasteur on his deathbed said that he was wrong and that the other guy was right but now it is too late because we have embedded Pasteur’s model so deeply and all sorts of interesting facts half (or more) of which I had no clue about. (Breathe, breathe...)

Unfortunately, around that time I saw that my bus was slowly negotiating its way up the small hill to the corner, and it was time of us to go on our separate ways. As I walked the few steps it took to get to the waiting bus, I realized that the evening wasn’t so bleak anymore. Down right balmy, actually.