Velvet Verbosity

I pull up at the gas station, cell-phone glued to my ear.  My mother is on the other end and we are talking about “family”.  Not our family, the general family, the sense of family.  In front of me, as though a collective hologram of the idea of family, is a road family.  They stand around a motorcycle sporting a double-seater side car complete with cover.  They tow a trailer of belongings behind them.  The father wears his long black receding hair in a ponytail and a silver feather earring in his left ear.  It reminds that I’ve never known the guy’s rule for which side the earring goes on.  He also wears black jeans, a black leather jacket, black boots, and a black stoop in his shoulders.  Some weight has ridden him there.

Mother is wide and wise, sitting on the curb eating Triscuits and spray-can cheese.  She wears a blue bandana over her blond, braided hair.  Their two girls hover around the motorcycle, clad in overalls and sporting teeth too large for their faces.  The look is complimented by eyes magnified by glasses.

I wonder where they are going.

I pull up to the intersection where the bike path suddenly disappears.  Out of the shade and the quiet the path dumps out on a four lane trafficked road lined with strip malls, fast food joints, and gas stations.  A gaggle of cyclists wait with me at the light for the cross signal.  The father asks me, “So where the heck is the bike trail from here?”.  I eye his family.  The seven year old just barely off her training wheels with her pink glitter sport bike.  The 10 year old on a wide three wheeled bike that seems fit for an 80 year old.  I wonder how she’s going to get it through the narrow dirt path I’ll have to show them.  How she’ll get it over the train tracks and down the wooden pallets.  The mother who, contrary to Gary Larson cartoons, does not want to take directions from someone else thank you very much.  The 12 year old who blends into the background with her normal bike.

“You can follow me”, I say.   They don’t follow me, they surround me like a cloud and we swarm across the busy intersection, and into the parking lot.  They fan out on either side of me in migration pattern.  We part after the tracks.

The sun beams down and I’m flying, ripping through air.  A cat sits watching me approach and when I call out to her she blinks yellow eyes at me in greeting, lifting her nose as I pass.

Under the bridge a young man naps, a handkerchief tucked into the back pocket of his jeans, his bike tucked in next to him like a lover.  I stop a little way on to adjust my seat and passing cyclists call out in the code of the trail, “you ok?”; “Tools?”, “Need anything?”.  I smile and wave them on.