24 December 2009
Melbourne, Australia
“Maybe, he thought, there aren’t any such things as good friends or bad friends – maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you’re hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they’re always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for, too, if that’s what has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want to be with, need to be with: people who build their houses in your heart.” — Stephen King
What a year, eh? With a bit of effort I can glance back and see myself in January, feverishly at work on my thesis at Rhodes College in Memphis and wondering anxiously if I would receive the Watson Fellowship. I was struggling through my Logic class but enjoying my work as an intern at the National Civil Rights Museum—busy as ever—all the while waiting nervously as my future hung in the balance.
In early January I interviewed with Watson Fellowship Program Director Cleveland Johnson. It went incredibly well (we started the interview talking casually about Suntour Derailleurs from the early 1980s), and while I was in Washington D.C. attending the National Bicycle Summit in March I received word that I had in fact been awarded the Watson Fellowship. The time had come to turn over the reins of Revolutions Community Bike Shop, to pass on my responsibilities at First Congregational Church, and to step down as a guitar player in Pezz and Bury the Living.
I graduated from Rhodes in May of 2009 and slowly began to pack up the life I had led for 25 years in Memphis. Farewell bicycle rides were ridden, conclusive rock shows were had, last suppers were consumed, and an assortment of final details was thrown to the wind. On the first of July this year, I found myself in Copenhagen, Denmark…overdressed for the warm weather (initial naivete), weighed down with too much stuff (attempt to combat the unknown), and lacking the phone number of my contact and host in Copenhagen (among the assortment of details in the wind). As I write today, this whirlwind of leaving Memphis and the minor irritations of my initial days as a Watson Fellow appear as distant mountains across a vast plain of new experience.
Still, I’ll never forget those first days of the fellowship. I wondered what I had gotten into. I wondered if I was really going to be able to do this…stay away from everything and everyone I valued for a year. I missed my girlfriend Mia tremendously, and as I glanced around at street signs I couldn’t read and overheard conversations I couldn’t understand, I felt totally isolated from everything I knew and loved.
And then, all at once, while sitting with my Danish host Clavs in the grassy median in front of his flat drinking ice-cold beer and observing the people playing basketball, riding bicycles, and soaking up the beautiful afternoon, I knew that this year would turn out alright. It was a high moment—one of hundreds over the last six months—but it was also an early lesson in six months spent learning to live (for the first time).
I certainly believe there are perfect days: beginning the morning with a French Press coffee and a bowl of chocolate Museli, catching the bike track into the city beneath the warm sun chasing away the slight chill, working on bikes for hours, playing some post-work bicycle polo, heading to the pub with friends and staying out later than is advisable. Sure there are perfect days…but mostly, we just have moments. Moments that seem to stand isolated in history, accessible only through those sticky tables and rickety chairs, at that tucked away place, with those interesting people around 1 a.m., near the old pool table, beneath the general murmur blanketing the whole of the barroom floor.
These moments are the stuff that our memories can only tease at; they are good moments with people you care about with a lifespan far short of the perfect day.
When I started this trip, I had the idea that I was in for a full-run of perfect days: 365 glorious, happenstance, wonder-filled sunrises and sunsets. Admittedly, I’ve had more than my fair share this year. But over and over again, I have recalled the words of Jorge Louis Borge, an Argentine poet and author of the work “Instantantes.” A short stanza from this poem sums up one of the most important things I’ve learned so far on this trip:
I was one of those people who lived every moment
sensibly and prolifically;
Of course, I had happy moments
But if I could go back
I would try to have only good moments.
I carried the entirety of this poem in my back pocket constantly for 4 months; that is, until it was ragged and indecipherable. Then, I put it down. I also carried a number of other talismans given to me by friends and family back home. Now, these too stay tucked away. Today I go out into the world alone; to be with people and to be by myself, but ultimately just to be. I don’t clutch stones tucked in my pocket for comfort anymore. I don’t finger the bundle of protective roots pinned to my lapel. I just listen to my heart, and try to be kind as often as possible. And that seems to get me on pretty well.
My socks and shoes are almost all worn out. I need new pants and shorts. I’ve got some torn cartilage in my right hip, and it gets past 100 degrees in Melbourne on a regular basis. But this is the stuff of life. Wearing my self out on new and old bike routes in increasingly familiar cities; working on bikes and sharing stories until it’s time for tea; playing bike polo in the freezing rain; raising a bike above my head in the center city’s busiest intersection surrounded by hundreds of other bike riders; camping alone on the coast of Denmark and watching the sun set on a calm ocean inlet; waking up in a dusty Amsterdam apartment with nothing but the day stretched out ahead of me; these are moments, among many imperfect days, that all turned out to be good.
In the next six months, I will travel to China, Guatemala, Mexico and Colombia, where surely more lifelong friends and travails lay ahead: tests to the mettle of my character. And my goal is to work for good moments—not always happy moments, but good moments with people I’ve come to care about.
The Watson has taught me that to have such moments, to have such people, is to have a lot in life. Sure I’ve learned a heap about bicycle policy, bicycle infrastructure, bicycle advocacy, bicycle sub-cultures, bicycle repair, and bicycle history…but I’ve barely mentioned these things in this space, and its because this trip has been about so much more for me. It’s been an exercise in learning to live a life of good moments.
Finally, David Simon and Ed Burns are two incredible TV producers. One of their efforts, a 6-episode series called “The Corner,” gives voice to the people that we often simply regard as problems. One of their characters, an addict named Gary McCullough, put into perspective what the Watson has been for me: “In school,” he said, “they taught us how to make a living. But they didn’t teach us how to live.” Indeed.
Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly, and strive for good moments. And who knows…maybe every so often you’ll have a perfect day.
24 December 2009
