a-squared + b-squared = child’s play
In which we recall a long-ago math lesson
It occurred to me, as I was pedaling my trusty e-bike to an editorial meeting at the East Aurora Advertiser, the world’s best hometown newspaper, that, at age 75, I have come full circle.
When I was a wee lad in the old hometown, my bicycle was my transportation, as important to me as the Lone Ranger’s Silver was to him. My bicycles were occasionally brand new, the cruelest of Christmas gifts given with several feet of snow on the ground at this latitude. More often they were anything but thoroughbreds, like Silver; they were creations from Mr. Denz’s bike shop at the corner of Prospect Avenue and Park Place. Behind his home stood, or, rather, leaned a one-car garage, listing to starboard at such an angle that we expected to find it lying on its side one day after a heavy wind. We learned over time, that what held it up were the thousands of bike parts stuffed inside, more parts than you ever imagined could fit, a veritable Snoopy’s doghouse. The sagging door opened to reveal a floor-to-ceiling assortment of wheels, tires, seats, cables, fenders, spokes, handlebars, chains, gears, baskets and tools crowded around a work bench, on which sat a tube-type AM radio usually tuned to a baseball game.
Mr. Denz, at least 100 years old, or so it seemed when were nine or ten, was kindly and patient, plying his post-retirement trade out of the goodness of his heart, because he barely charged us for his services. He could fix any bike, no matter how rickety or forlorn and make it run. Or he could take mismatched parts and with the skill of an alchemist, conjure a one-of-a-kind creation that rode, steered, stopped when it needed to and sounded trés cool with a Ted Williams baseball card flapping in the spokes.
We thought we had cornered the market on coolness, careening around the village on two wheels, usually in a squadron of four or six or more, baseball mitts swinging from handlebars, effecting those sliding skid stops with the back pedal brakes, never a thought about helmets; those hadn’t been invented yet. We never locked our bikes, just parked them at our destination: Hamlin Park, the Boys and Girls Club, Main Street School, the ball diamonds at South Street and Olean, Hubbs’ grocery store where we could turn in empty pop bottles we found for the two-cent deposit that would buy some penny candy from the glass case in Hubbs’. Looking back, I’m afraid we broke most every safety rule there is, including the one that forbade riding a friend on the handlebars while I pedaled. Some guys didn’t have bikes; what do you expect?
Of course, our bikes had names, suggestive of the self-image we imagined ourselves projecting—Flying Tiger, Flash, Cannonball, Streak, Lightning—as we ruled the village streets and every shortcut where cars couldn’t go.
Fast forward 65 (sixty-five, jeez!) years and I find myself once again on two wheels. At first, a few years ago, riding my new e-bike was a complement to driving my old Yukon, a mixture of healthful exercise and practicality. I saved money on the considerable amount of gas the Yukon demanded to lug its oversized body through the village streets. And I always found the closest parking spot in our beehive of a village where parking can be scarcer than dandelions on the fairway at the country club.
Then I bought a trailer for the bike from the modern-day equivalent of Mr. Denz, Dan Park at Chain Ring Rhythm bike shop, which allowed me to shop for groceries on two wheels, drop off aluminum cans for recycling, even load the the trailer with the 40-pound bag of birdseed from Bulldog’s Feed store. When the Yukon died last fall with 185,000 miles on it, the e-bike, once again, became my principal means of getting around town.
Even though my sweetheart and I are managing pretty well with one car, and even though my days of lugging tools and ladders to job sites are long gone, I hope to someday get another vehicle. The winters around here tend to linger long after they’ve worn out their welcome. And I understand that there are a few giggles directed my way as I become a village character: “Oh yeah, I know him; he’s that old guy with the purple helmet that pulls his bike trailer everywhere, even in the rain.”
“I’m just relivin’ my youth,” I tell them. “Besides, I know all the short cuts you guys in your four-wheeled gas guzzlers can’t get to.”
One thing I’m lacking, though, is a name for the e-bike. I don’t think Flying Tiger, or Flash, Streak or Lightning are appropriate at my stage of life when I have no “need for speed” as racers do. “Arrive alive,” is more like it. The name “Rocinante” of Don Quijote and John Steinbeck fame was already taken, “Lusitania” has a local connection, but gave me a sinking feeling. I considered the “Purple Knight” to go with my new helmet, but that seemed a trifle presumptuous.
I pondered the naming of my steed one day as I headed from “Talk of the Townie” headquarters on the western fringe of the village to Bulldog’s Feed and then up to the newspaper office. From our place, I cut through the abandoned Bank of America property to the light at Oakwood, a savings of a maybe 50 yards. Instead of taking Oakwood to South Willow around the cemetery, I pedaled the hypotenuse of that right triangle though the headstones, pausing briefly to salute the plots we have picked out for ourselves, should the need ever arise. That old chestnut from a long-ago math class—a2 + b2 = c2—yielded a hypotenuse that saved me a couple hundred yards easy over driving the legs of the right triangle. At the end of Linden Avenue, I found another hypotenuse, through the baseball/softball complex, by the community pool, onto South Street where I took advantage of a last hypotenuse behind the old Foss Motor Sales—now a tattoo parlor and gymnastics place for kids—before coasting into Bulldog’s.
I began to think of all the short cuts—all the hypotenuses—I knew after three-quarters of a century as a townie.
And I came up with the perfect name for my e-bike—sophisticated, descriptive, erudite, slightly mystical, totally Greek, more than a little goofy and child-like..
Pythagoras.
If not full circle, then full triangle.
I kinda like El Caballero Violeta
Your line about the Lusitania was absolute gold.