banana seat

thanksgiving day always makes me nostalgic for when i was growing up in new jersey. my childhood thanksgivings were spent waking up early (remember when you didn’t want to go to sleep?) riding around on my bike, hangin with my friends all day until it was time to eat the dinner. we would see how far we could go. everything was closed, so it was like a ghost town. it was always cold so i would ride with a parka or some huge coat which would eventually find itself tied around my waist. as i did my bunny hops and jumped off curbs, part of the dangling coat would inevitably get caught in the backwheel and either slow me or abruptly stop and throw me off. when i came home i was a mess and there was always some kind of garment and bodily damage. my mom was not amused. but all would be forgiven and we would proceed to eat huge amounts of food with all our relatives then spend the rest of the night playing music and hearing stories from our elders. it was very norman rockwell some years.

i miss the days when the only thing i had to remember was what time dinner was.

this weekend, my friends and i were garage sale shopping and we came across ‘the bike’. it was a schwinn stingray fastback with the 5 speek stick shitft. it was the classic ‘lemon’ color and had the glitter banana seat to boot. the original owner who was in his thirties was selling it for almost 300 bucks. it had all original parts was in very good shape with some rust (which can be fixed). this bike was built in the late 60s and early 70s and this was ‘the bike’ to get when i was a kid. i ended up getting a bad copy from a little company called ‘kia’. everything was about the same except my banana seat was black. the banana seat and matching hand grips are what makes the stingray so kick ass. my black banana seat plain, boring and in the summer burnt my ass. no doubt, some kind of metaphoric foreshadowing for what was to come in my life.

we talked to the guy for a bit and just being around it made me happy to feel like a kid again and that made my week.

(coolpix 990)