Ride Through the Time Warp

I’ve always written and for a long long time my writing was just transcribing my daily life. That would have been during the late eighties and early nineties. I thought my life pretty strange, often incomprehensible, and also because I just HAD to write. I didn’t have a story. Among the stuff I wrote were narratives of the time I spent with the boys on bikes, a bunch of neighborhood boys who piled their BMX bikes and selves into the back of my truck and went with me to Mission Trails Regional Park in San Diego where I hiked and they rode. I also wrote a screen play for the video we were making. I knew that the boys were incredible and that their sport was beautiful. Most of all, we were all having fun.

I’ve recently been in contact with one of the boys on bikes, well, one that I never lost contact with. He’s now a dad in his 40s and he’s teaching his kids to ride BMX. They are all on a team together in Phoenix, AZ. I see his posts on Facebook, and I feel a warm little thrill inside. I know how hard it was for him to get past the chasm of the teen years. He didn’t have a dad, and he’s being the dad to his kids that he never had. He and the other boys — and maybe the lady driving the truck (that would have been me) — were all square pegs, so to speak, and all of us were on the verge of being hit by some major life shit.

I asked him sometime last week if he’d like the stories I wrote about us back then. I was so happy that he does. So, I put the stories I still have together in a little book with some of the few photos that still exist. We took a lot of video, but few still pictures and of them? I’ve moved house twice… It’s a pity because, as he told me, they are the only photos of his childhood that he has. The same with the stories. I don’t have that many. I’ve gone through my notebooks of writing practice (there is some really BAD writing in there) and a lot of it (besides being bad writing) is only marginally about the boys and mostly about my deteriorating marriage. As if the 26 journals comprising The Examined Life weren’t enough!

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2020/12/14/rdp-monday-peg/