For her seventy-third birthday, my mother

wants a bicycle. She doesn ’t mean the stationary type, as seen in sweat-glazed commercials. What she desires are thin tires, pro-level gears, and squeezable brakes. Twenty speeds at least. A bike with a basket I’ll pedal to Boston, she alliterates, which is when I wonder if it’s her illness talking (manic phases, grand iosity) and not the unpoetic woman with next-to-zero muscle. The one who totters from bed to toilet, who can’t stand without leverage. A diminished-yet-persistent person I could try harder to love. A real racing machine, she says every day this week. Who knows why she’s stuck on bikes. Maybe she saw the Tour de France, cheered lithe cyclists slicing Alps. She might imagine spitting in ditches, sucking down energy gel, mean-mugging rain and snow. I don’t doubt her mettle: her reckless ambition to own the road, climb hills, then hunker low in tough gusts thrown by speedy trucks. I would ne ver. I remember a mother who, for my eighth birthday, led a band of boys to Mammoth Cave. Wild, monstrous kids. She took us on the Historic Tour, gazed with us in the Bottomless Pit, then ushered us past a lid cracked on a Giant’s Coffin. We heard water drip on the River Styx, crossed a shaky brid ge, and, heroic, emerged to sip summer’s verdant air and lick ice cream cones in sunlight. But this I remember best: the start, sprinting together down the first tunnel, torchlight far ahead, our sneakers wingbeats in the dark. The tunnel opened to the great Rotunda, ...
Source: JAMA - Category: General Medicine Source Type: research