As I turned the corner, the green juniper bush slapping my legs as it encroached on the sidewalk, I saw a little white envelope flit across my path. I dropped my bike on the grass and caught the little parcel before the wind could fling it into the oncoming Hillyard traffic.

It was an envelope addressed to someone at the Spokane County jail, presumably stuffed with a letter to someone's son, father, brother or lover. The apartment on the corner bore the return address on the letter, so with my bike helmet in one hand and the letter in the other I knocked on the door.

"Who is it?" a gruff older man's voice yelled out. "Just a neighbor," I replied. (Literally, I was his neighbor.) An older lady came to the door, and from the way she looked at me suspiciously, I get the feeling she's had multiple strangers knock on her door over the years, not always with good news.

"Pardon me ma'am, the wind was blowing your mail away," I said as I handed her the dirtied and bent envelope. Immediately, I could see a difference in her composure as she relaxed and thanked me, turning away to answer some question from inside the room as she held the letter to her breast and closed the door.

If I had been in my car, I would have ran that envelope over and never even noticed it.

Taking notice of stuff

In fact, I've noticed a lot more things around the neighborhood and around the community now that I've been commuting on and off by two wheels instead of rolling around in my hideous Pontiak Aztek.

For instance, I'm sure you saw the people wearing red in support of the teacher's walkout a few days ago. But did you see them, actually see them as people, as individuals? Could you see their faces, how they were smiling but had an underlying seriousness to their gazes? Could you see how many of them were women, mothers and teachers? Could you see how there were hardly any millennials in their ranks or how men were easily outnumbered five to one?

I could see them clearly, as I slowed down to cross the wooden bridge that spans the river next to the INB, and I know for a fact I wouldn't have paid them the slightest attention if I had zoomed by on Riverside in my car.

How about the Hike It Baby group that Rich Landers wrote about back in Feb? It's one thing to read about them, but it is another thing entirely when you ride past a pack of forty momma bears pushing strollers along the Centennial trail. One gets the sense that this particular grouping of women had the collective willpower to bend time and space to protect their little niños, and they commanded a wide and respectful berth.

This isn't the neighborhood you're looking for

Back in Hillyard, if all you ever see of Dogtown are the main drags that criss-cross the neighborhood, you'll never see how many perfectly normal people live there. The smell of the fragrant roses in immaculately groomed yards tended by kneepad-wearing grandmothers. The bare-chested grandpa chasing his bare-chested grandson through the lawn sprinklers and having a grand old time. The handsome Latino men putting a fresh coat of whitewash on a dingy off-white colored picket fence, who looked like they were torn straight from a Normal Rockwell cover of the Saturday Evening Post.

Since I started riding a bicycle again, I've discovered that I look forward to each and every ride because there are so many roads to take, so many things to see, so many things to smell and hear and do. To be honest, I never thought that "excercise" could be fun, because it hasn't been fun in a long, long time. But this isn't just exercise.

This is me enjoying life a lot more, rather than zooming past it in my ugly Pontiac Aztek that smells faintly of Whoppers of years gone by and spilled coffee.

 

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