Riding Around to the Parks

by Lloyd B. Abrams

I’m riding northbound on my recumbent bicycle, hugging the white line along the right side of the road, traveling along with traffic. When I was a teenager, years ago, though it often feels like yesterday, I did my bike riding on a three-speed bike that I kept carefully cleaned, oiled and polished. In my thirties and forties, I rode on a “high end” ten-speed Raleigh upright bike that I allowed myself the luxury to buy after giving up my second motorcycle. Actually, selling the Honda wasn’t on my own volition. Several years before I had been in a major accident which wrecked my first motorcycle and from which I escaped relatively unscathed—“being caught by the hand of God,” as my wife put it. Then, after a second minor accident, my wife, who continues to fear abandonment from childhood after finding her father in his death throes when she was eight years old, gave me an ultimatum in the form of a choice: It was either the motorcycle or her—one had to go. Nowadays, I joke with people that I replied, “Let me think about it…I’ll get back to you in a week.” But back then, when riding a motorcycle defined, in part, who I was, in terms of self esteem and individuality, giving up the bike wasn’t so easy.

Now at the age of 51, I ride “laid back” on my state-of-the-art 24-speed recumbent bicycle, moving along at 18 miles per hour, and often more than 20, checking for traffic approaching from behind in the rear view mirror attached to photo-chromatic distance glasses bought especially for riding. Though human powered vehicle designs have evolved, and components constructed out of space-age materials have gotten stronger and lighter, in reality—if there is such as thing as true “reality” out there along the long white line—nothing much seems to have changed for me. As the country and western song twangs, “I’m on the road again.”

Looking back in the rear view mirror at several distinct stages of my life, I see a young teenager carefully placing his Louisville Slugger baseball bat next to his Spalding glove in the basket mounted alongside the rear wheel. He then gets on his bike on the sultry summer weekend day and rides around to the two elementary schools in town and then on to the high school, looking for a pickup baseball game. More often than not—in fact, most of the time—the fields are empty, barren, silent, abandoned. Disappointed and discouraged, he turns around and rides home. On the way, he drops in to visit his father at the drugstore where he’s allowed to pick out some nickel candy and gum. When he gets home, he plops himself in front of the TV set, turns to the Yankee game on channel 11, and works through the treasure trove of candy until his jaw gets tired working on a Sugar Daddy.

When he’s in his late twenties and thirties, he gets into his Dodge hatchback and drives around to the municipal parks of Nassau County, looking not for a pickup baseball game, but for a paddleball game—a man’s game—for now he’s grown up, or has the illusion that he has. On fair weather days, he knows that he can find a weekday afternoon game at a few parks, and on Saturday and Sunday morning there are games going on all over. But when it has been raining, or the temperature is too hot or too cold, and he “needs” his game—his physical “fix”—he often drives to three or four parks which he usually finds empty. He then drives home, feeling dejected and unfulfilled, having wasted several hours with nothing accomplished, nothing to show for the miles of driving, and the dozens of traffic lights and signs he had to stop for.

During the two months that he has off in the summer, after having gotten rid of the motorcycle, he often uses his new 10-speed to get around on so his wife can take their young kids by car to the recreation center in town. He attaches the paddleball racquet to his rear carrier with a bungee cord, stores balls, sweat bands, handball gloves and other paraphernalia in his bicycle bag, and sets off in search of a game. If he doesn’t get to play, then at least he’ll get a workout. Once, he mentally counted 23 parks that he had played in, but didn’t bother to write their names down.

Which brings me to the present. Twenty-three parks—I really wish I had made a list. What is so glaringly apparent is that I’m still riding around to the parks, now on my recumbent bicycle—to parks which magnetically draw me to them, I sometimes imagine, like a moth to a flame. Although I had always assumed that I had used free will in deciding what routes to ride, it seems that I am inevitably drawn to a park.

Over the years, I have mapped out four main riding loops ranging from 25 to 40 miles, mostly on suburban streets. The longer routes go to Jones Beach, or along the Long Beach boardwalk, or through Eisenhower Park on the way to somewhere else, or to Bethpage Park on the Bethpage bikeway. And when I don’t want to venture far from home, or if I fear that the weather might become inclement, I often ride a 30 mile route that passes through five local parks.

Just for example: On a ride to Oyster Bay early in the spring, I bought a Gatorade at a neighborhood deli and then found Roosevelt Park at the water’s edge, where I sat and had a snack. At the end of the annual “Bike New York’s Great Five Boro Bike Tour” in May, I always make it a point, before packing my bicycle into the back of the station wagon, to stop for a while at Battery Park, which happens to be the starting and finishing point of the ride. When I rode my second annual birthday solo “century,” a 100-mile ride, this past August, I ended up at a Long Island Sound beach in Miller Place. When I ride westbound toward New York City, I’ll stop to enjoy the ethnicity of Flushing Meadow Park, and when I ride as far as Manhattan, Central Park is always a destination.

Despite the many hours over the years that I have spent in the parks, I have only recently come to realize how important they have been to me, and still continue to be. Somebody might insult me by saying, “Hello…where have you been?” But when I realized where I was heading, while riding northbound, hugging the white line—that I was once again on the way to a park—the “ah-hah” experience hit me square in the face. And I silently chuckled to myself, for what else could I do?

I find myself looking back at my life retrospectively, for maybe that’s the real purpose of these reflections. One of my earliest park memories took place when I was four or five years old, and my brother, who was 5« years older, took me to Lincoln Terrace Park, several blocks from our Crown Heights apartment in Brooklyn. Hazily, I remember an altercation he had with some bigger, brown-skinned boys, which my brother apparently lost, because he literally ended up losing his shirt to them.

Aside from the amazement and awe associated with being involved with and witnessing the birth of our two children, one of my most fulfilling experiences I ever had took place in a park. The name of a recent movie, “As Good as it Gets”—though here in the form of a question form—comes to mind. At Salisbury Park, before it was renamed Eisenhower Park, I finished the 1983 Long Island Marathon—the first of my four marathons—not without concerted effort, but certainly without unendurable pain. What made it even more special was that I had carefully planned out how I was going to do the entire 26 miles, determining to finish “in one piece.” I had studied library books about how to train and build up my endurance as “race” day approached, and the techniques of how to actually go about running such a long distance. I always thought marathons were run by elite runners—surely not by runners like me. Even though I admit that I walked a bit at times, and decidedly stopped to drink water at the water stops to avoid dehydration, I did finish without shin splints, without muscle pulls—even without any blisters. No, I didn’t “win” the race per se, as many asked me afterwards, but I did finish the whole thing. What a wonderful feeling of exhilaration I had! So I did win, for it was a personal triumph.

I have tasted the delicious sweetness of victory, as well as the sourness of despair. When we spent many hours together on the paddleball courts we often laughed at the aspect of four grown men hitting around a little black ball. In terms of finding an “ultimate meaning to life,” we probably knew, in the backs of our minds, that the game was quite insignificant. Our goal, of course, was always to win, and to not have to sit out and wait for “winners” while our bodies became cold and our muscles tightened up. Because lop-sided games were never much fun, the teams tended to be evenly matched and the games were challenging. Once, over three glorious Sunday hours, a friend and I won twelve games in a row. We were really “cookin’,” for it was the best day of paddleball we had ever had. Exhausted, we sat together on the park bench watching the remaining games. We turned to each other and we knew that that was as good as it would ever get, for how could we ever top winning twelve in a row? Yet after that day, playing paddleball was never the same.

Four grown men hitting a ball around! I loved the challenge, the camaraderie, the competition and all that. Hitting a perfect shot—or an impossible over-the-head shot—felt great even if the shot happened to be pure luck, determined by the law of averages: one is bound to hit a great shot over time. But on many occasions I left the park with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, of having spent too much time—of having wasted a lot of time—with nothing “lasting” accomplished other than beating up my body. I’d play hard in order to win, and then I’d feel the effects of my efforts for a day or two.

After not having played for several years, I now look back, with a sense of ruefulness and regret, at the many weekend afternoons when my wife had taken the children visiting or had gone other places with them while “Daddy was at the park.” We justified our separateness then by saying that we were giving each other much needed “space.” Sometimes I gave my wife a break and took my five year old son with me on a Sunday morning to play in the huge playground while I played on the courts. When we reminisce, he tells me how alone he felt back then, all by himself, while I was too busy to be interrupted to be with him or to tend to his needs. Even though I played and won so many games over the years in the company of men, I don’t know how many of the real things in life I really missed out on.

Many parks are located at the end of a road next to a body of water—at the end of a bike path or just beyond the dead end of a street—along the bay, a river, a lake or the ocean. Watching the water and smelling the saltiness of the air is soothing and healing. Parks have become my destination, the midpoint or sometimes the endpoint of a ride. Last summer, I rode a “century” from Massapequa out to Montauk with members of my bicycle club. At the 92 mile mark, at the village of Montauk, all of the other members of my group had had enough, and packed their bicycles and tandems into and onto the cars that they had driven out the day before. However, for my own sense of accomplishment, I needed to “do” the full 100 miles, which meant riding an extra five miles out to the lighthouse located at Montauk Point State Park, the easternmost point of Long Island. For me, getting to a park and then returning to “civilization” is rejuvenation, and I couldn’t understand why they couldn’t summon up enough energy to “complete” the ride. Their needs were obviously fulfilled by what they done, but I’m really glad I did the full 100.

When I get maudlin or morbid, I sometimes think about choreographing the exact time, place and manner of my death. I hope it would not be tied down by restraints and hooked up to machines in a medical facility, but more like, as rumor had it, the way Nelson Rockefeller went—“dictating” in the nude to his secretary. I used to joke with my paddleball buddies that when I die, I’d like it to be at the end of a great comeback victory, and then after I’m cremated, to have my ashes scattered over the court. Nowadays, out riding on the road, one of the most exquisite sensory experiences is riding fast on a smooth road, having a tailwind pushing me through the cooler air of early evening after a long ride on a hot summer day, feeling the soft breeze sensuously caressing my skin glistening with perspiration, while it envelopes me, reviving me with its gentleness. Maybe that’s when I’d like to “cash it in.” Maybe that’s as good as it gets.

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April 8, 1998…Copyright © 1998, Lloyd B. Abrams