‘I think I shall always stick to my bike,’ said Christopher. ‘The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.’
-Iris Murdoch, The Red and the Green, 1965 [Thank you, Anu!]
Eyes and shoulders had had all they could take of the computer by late in the afternoon, so I led Gordon out into the backyard to visit our bikes. Scruffy and sagging, these sad, neglected creatures don’t deserve the fate befallen them here in East Hollywood. I sat in the driveway and tenderly wiped away the accumulated dirt and the streaks of paint someone had drizzled on them in the cluttered garage. I pined for those prelapsarian days in Berkeley when I relied on my bike for speedy transport to work. Funny, I don’t remember ever cleaning it so carefully back then. I never really had to try to bond with it; I just rode.
Something caught my eye on the rear tire of Bob’s bright blue Specialized. Nimbus Ex tires, eh? I made a sudden mental leap from mourning my lost bike-commuting glory to imagining a secret history for the humble mechanism before me. Maybe Bob’s bike was endowed with parts of some Quidditch broomstick prototype, a bit of wizardry slipped into our Muggle world hitherto unnoticed by the Ministry of Magic regulators?!