Adult Geography

“Hey, eeeeasy, mister!” the shrill voice of the boy child scraped across my eardrums, an icy spike into the throbbing mass of my head. Shirtless and buzzcut, the kid and his buddies half-glared, half-shrank away from the front of my car as I rolled forward an inch. Buzzcut was on a bike, one of those BMX types that look cool but are a total pain in the ass to ride anywhere for long. His peeps, two of them, were slightly ahead of him and walking fast like they actually cared to not be in the path of impatient people driving big hunks of metal.

Don’t wet yerself, Junior, I muttered to myself as I drove past the bike to make my turn, I wasn’t gonna hit you. Like I needed the complication of a tweenager sprawled across my hood. Oh, hell to the nahhh.

All I really wanted to do, I thought, was to give him notice. Notice that it is no proof of manhood to wait until the light is just about to turn and then decide to race across the street before the cars could start moving. Nor does it pay to play daredevil with a cheap bike or a skateboard.

Bike vs. car = epic failure for the bike.

I sighed, feeing grumpy and old beyond my years. Grumpy like the dwarf, but with a boil on his ass. Old like the Sphinx, and just as battered. Turning the corner, with the shouts of the neighborhood Evel Knievel and Co. fading fast, I wondered what had happened to me.

When did I get to be the Geezer?

It wasn’t until much later that I realized I was a teensy bit jealous, and lost. Those kids were me decades ago, doing much the same thing with my friends, bike and skateboards and attitude. They were getting about on a summer evening the only way they could. Which is to say, on foot or leg powered wheels. As such, they had a completely different perspective on where they were in the landscape, and a completely different view of the tyrannical freedom of the car.

A half-mile later I was thinking back to when the best way I had to get around was by bike, or by walking. The place I grew up in was very flat, almost no hills and no real steep grades to speak of. My world was circumscribed by the energy and time I could devote to getting somewhere. Of course, I didn’t have very far to go for most things. Most of my friends were within easy biking distance, and some were certainly close enough for walking visits. True to form, as a kid I had no appreciation of that luxury. Walking was anathema, unless unavoidable, and biking was a necessity in the absence of a car. But, gawdddd, all that pedaling! Mom, Dad, I wantneedgottahavecantlivewithoutmylicensepleaseletmedrivebymeacarpleasepleaseplease…well, you know the drill.

The place I grew up in was no small town, nor was it a big city by most measures. Flat, roads in a grid, convenience store around the corner (where I spent far too much money on pinball) and a park not far away. Getting around these places on a bike or on foot was always an investment of time (of which I now know I had plenty) and energy (also of which I had plenty); it always seemed a bit of an adventure. Will the chain pop off? Is it going to rain? How do I carry a pizza and an illicit six-pack on the handlebars without dropping them? You know all the shortcuts, the curves, the places where its cool to ride hell-for-leather and hope to not get flattened by a car. You get to know whose yards to cut through, and which ones have dogs to avoid (or smack the hell out of with a newspaper). Everything seemed potentially a LONG way away. And it seems a REALLY long way when you decide to leave a friend’s house at two o’clock in the morning after a party, where everyone is either asleep or (ahem) passed out, and walk home. Jay-zus, was that a long night. I discovered the meaning of “miles”. Given the dodgy nature of some of the places I had to traverse, it was the fear n’ beer that got me home. And, yes, Mom, I’ll never do that again…

Traveling this way gives an amazing, intimate knowledge and understanding of the terrain of one’s daily existence. It is a perspective hard to obtain while driving in car. Or maybe it is that the scale of things changes after years behind the wheel, pushing the gas instead of pedaling the wheels.

Thinking back to my childhood and adolescence spent hoofing it, or pedaling my chubby buns off in the heat of a sticky Tidewater summer, I realize now that the city of my birth was really a neighborhood. And to my kid-sized mind, the neighborhood was more than a city; it was a big country bounded only by the limits of my muscles and my ambition to explore. It was a kingdom of the strange and of the familiar, places outside my daily existence and the delights of a home to go to, safe and dry. I used to think it was big. Really BIG.

When I go there now, to visit my parents and my brother, I am always stunned by how small my hometown seems, how close everything is now that I drive. It weirds me out, even makes me a little sad, although I’m not sure exactly why. Maybe it’s the passage of time and the nostalgia that goes with it. Maybe it’s the realization that the scale of my existence has changed drastically from that of the kid I once was.

Later on that same night that I played matador with Buzzcut and his buds, I pulled into a drive thru ATM to deposit a check. All thoughts of “Easy, Mister!” flew out the window when I realized that I had no pen or pencil to fill out the deposit envelope. Cursing and muttering, I started the car again and headed across the parking lot to a grocery store, looking to buy some pens so I could get back in the car and finish my errand.

I got out of the car, Grumpy the Dwarf in search of Bic love. As I shut the car door, I happened to look back towards the road. There on the sidewalk, in a group of three, was a mother and who I assume were her daughters. She was pushing a baby stroller, the girls were laughing and skipping as they headed across the road to the neighborhood on the other side. At that moment it became clear to me why I felt jealous of Buzzcut. He was reveling in the oblivious freedom of youth, exploring his country anew, learning the land for the first time.

Me, I was tired, having wasted too many sunny days taking graduate courses in Adult Geography.

And still trying to get that degree.