It took me all of six hours to get me a bicycle when I landed in the Netherlands; this inclusive of the travel time from the airport to Delft. I’m not sure if this is a record but I’m pretty sure it’s right there among the top times yet but I digress. She was an awesome machine; a sturdy Dutch city bike of original models thus a reason for great envy amongst its peers. She? You ask, well following the standard naming convention worldwide of pretty much everything (islands, planets, cars, hurricanes). Blackie she was named promptly as she was quite the black cycle and creativity had taken a day off then and so it stuck.
It took a short while to notice things about the character of this machine. She was a beauty; when she was younger I think. The black shiny coat was still there in bits and pieces; perhaps I daresay she was not as aesthetically pleasing as she once was but not everything can be as perfect as we want it to be. She was a sturdy bicycle once but exposure to the elements over time have eroded that structural integrity and thus contributed to her lack of aesthetic pleasantness. Basically that is code for the fact that a layer of rust had invaded one of her sides and threatened to spread like some crazy virus across her whole structure; however, this did not deter me from keeping her.
The main reason for my refusal to let her go was the fact that she was magnanimous to levels that would put any human saint to shame. No sound would pass her by before she quickly adopted it and made it her own. At first I thought it was a slight nuisance; a passive hobby that would pass in time, when she learned better I thought perhaps but how wrong I was. No sound and I mean no sound however loud, horrible or unbearable would ever be allowed to stray away form her. Thus she was aptly named St. Blackie. She picked them all up and after a while the constant clanging and banging away of the various squeaky parts of her frame slowly began to sound like the world famous song Eye of the tiger by Survivor. I should have dropped her then but it was pretty entertaining to have the soundtrack as I cycled and besides having that bike was a conversation started beyond all others. Eventually the bike sounds have developed and are slowly starting to sound like a brass band in practice so much so that I began to consider having a banner printed and stick it on the back of my bike emblazoned across it BRASS BAND AUDITIONS that way the strange looks I elicited from the people would stop but I didn’t.
Word got out of the things I had been saying about St. Blackie and the other bikes in the bike park began to poison her mind against me. They made her think that I was the enemy; they made her hate me; they made her want to eliminate me; they made her evil. It would have been a pretty excellent end for them had she succeeded but she didn’t; she went of a corner, grew wings and flew and took me with her. As she slammed into the tree it dawned on me that this was an attempt on my life but it failed. They say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned; I know.
So now she rests in the basement of a building somewhere; bereft of her ability to be ridden anywhere as she bent her tyre into an insufferable knot in an attempt to get back at me. So I moved on; I had to. They say its better to have loved and lost and I believe it now. Every now on then as I move around on my new bike and I wonder, what new thing would St. Blackie have done now that would have led to yet another conversation? What new sound would she have picked up this time that would have made me ever so mad yet ever so happy? I can only wonder and mourn my fallen bicycle, St. Blackie.
