Embarrassing injuries volume 2: that bike wreck in front of Chad

Chad was really quite ahead of his time. It’s like he knew we’d get to this point in human history where favorite pastimes would include seeing what else you could make using your sourdough starter, playing oversize pingpong (pickleball), and forming vigilante groups of one to police the choices and safety of other people. I know all about vigilantes since my home state of Montana had them and growing up, we visited their stomping ground of Virginia City every Memorial Day. To say “vigilantes” like an authentic Montanan, please don’t pronounce the “t.” It sounds sort of like someone is saying “vigil-annies,” because that’s precisely how we say it.

But like Chad, I’m getting ahead of myself.

It was a gorgeous summer day in the early 2000s. My tan was about the only thing going right in my life; I had no money and no job. If I’d had a pet, it’s head would’ve been falling off. But my prospects were hopefully about to change. I’d landed an interview for a twenty-hour/week student secretary job in the math department, and was sure I’d soon be pulling home a whopping $122 per week.

Math was my thing if ever I had a thing. Not to brag—which always means a person is about to brag—but in seventh grade, I was selected for a pilot program to begin high school algebra in eighth grade. They should do more of this for the unintended benefit that we twenty-eight kids—jocks, band geeks, and blushing shy kids like myself—knew we’d all meet again our senior year in AP Calculus and might as well get an early start on accepting each other as-is. So we did.

I thrived in math until the final few months of the Great Math Reunion of Senior Year when I had no idea what was going on in AP Calc, except that our teacher was overdue for retirement. He’d officially gotten cranky, and was taking it out on random kids in the halls. And Helga, Inga, and Olga.

In some 1990s stereotyping at its best, Mr. M. called me Helga and two other blonde students with Scandinavian ancestry Inga and Olga, always using a thick accent reminiscent of Oaken from Frozen to address us and often giving us a hard time when we didn’t understand calculus. A lot of math class was spent managing hurt feelings, and wondering if my out-of-town crush, Adam, had emailed me.

I rationally knew being a ho-hum Scandinavian math genius wasn’t going to land me this administrative role. Did I choose, though, to think that it portended—nay, guaranteed—a positive outcome to the interview? I did.

Celebrating prematurely, I treated myself to a Jamba Juice I couldn’t afford. I rode my bike back to my apartment to dress in my best American Eagle khakis and a white collared shirt, then continued to my interview. Late-afternoon traffic was heavy, and while not a novice bike commuter, I chose that day not to ride in traffic. It felt like the safer option to ride my blue Schwinn bike on the sidewalk. Operative word: “felt.”

The fancier bike I purchased several years after I can’t remember what happened to my Schwinn.

Just past the Duck Pond, and between sips of smoothie, I was really feeling on top of my broke life. My outfit complimented the gorgeous tan my dermatologist wishes I never would’ve prioritized, I was about to get a job, and just think how many more Jambas I could buy with all that money?! Then I got one of those thoughts, a little ping that cast the tiniest cloud on my otherwise blue sky. “Is my back tire flat?”

I’ve had a nearly life-long irrational belief that bikes should move effortlessly when you peddle; exertion means you might have a flat tire. My highly scientific method of checking for a flat is to eyeball the tires while riding. The front is easy but that back one is a little tricker. You have to crane your neck to look over your shoulder, contorting your face as one does, AND maintain forward motion. That day, my assessment revealed the excellent news that my back tire was not, in fact, flat. Returning my eyes to my immediate future, I recognized a section of broken-up sidewalk just ahead, and braked. Hard.

Since my right hand was holding my splurge of a smoothie, only my left-hand was available for braking. Which means when I braked, only the front brake engaged—immediately and VERY emphatically.

The blue bike and I came to a dead stop on the sidewalk. The Jamba Juice didn’t. The white styrofoam cup sailed out of my hand and landed—mercifully intact—on the sidewalk ahead of me.

Momentum then had its way with me and the bike. A famous law of something says “an object in motion will stay in motion except after ‘c’ as in neighbor and weigh.” What I thought was a stop was actually only the cutest little hiccup in the forward motion of objects (my bike and body) which wanted very much to continue forward. The dead-stopped non-flat front tire served as a fulcrum around which the rest of everything could pivot.

So we—a now intertwined mess of back tire, bike frame, tote bag, and tan body—flipped over the planted front tire. We landed on that intact Jamba Juice cup, exploding it like a piñata. Remnants of the cup and smoothie joined the party, and the merry bunch of us skidded on my forearms several feet down the sidewalk, my nose just centimeters from the concrete.

As injured as my forearms were, my pride was injured worse. As one does, I tried to pretend like I was fine. “Ha ha ha!” I laughed out loud as I extricated a Razzleberry pink, tie-dyed version of myself from the Schwinn. “Hee hee hee. That was SO funny!” I said. Not for the benefit of the steady stream of cars which couldn’t hear me, but for the pedestrian who was coming down the stairs.

This student—in hindsight, probably a graduate math student—asked, “Are you okay?” I’d only barely answered in the affirmative when he said what he really wanted to say: “You should have been wearing a helmet.”

Should I have been? You bet. Did his telling me this change anything about my current scrape? Nope. Did I need chastising from a morally-superior stranger? I did not. I needed someone to laugh with me after ascertaining I was okay, and for them to tell me, “The VERY SAME thing happened to me just last week!” Find or make up some common humanity, you know. This guy didn’t seem to particularly want me to be unhurt; he just wanted me to follow rules and recommendations.

Gathering my bruised pride, my scraped body, and whatever had spilled out of my crossbody bag, I proceeded—albeit a bit slowly—to the math department building. There I found a bathroom and did as much cleaning up as a person can do with coarse paper towels and cheap hand soap. These are not the recommended supplies for getting pink stains out of khakis and white shirts but I did my best. Thankfully, my shirt sleeves covered my bleeding elbows and forearms since I had no Band-Aids handy and was still pretending like this was all no big deal.

I would give several Jamba Juices to know the interviewer’s first impressions of me as a job candidate. Of course I explained my appearance, and since not even a clueless college student wants to be seen in public with obnoxious pink food stains all over their clothes, they had to believe me. Of course I wasn’t fully present in the interview. And of course I didn’t get the job.

But of course I remember the whole experience and am even kind of glad for the part Chad played in it. If you ever meet him, let him know that even if I still check for flats while riding, I’m pretty good about wearing a helmet now. And that I finally “get” that he might not have been trying to be condescending at all. For all we know, Chad’s out there writing a Substack article about how he just said the first thing that came to his mind and regrets not laughing with the tan klutz who exploded a Jamba Juice all over herself…

Isn’t life cool, and aren’t people interesting? See you in the next one…

FIRST PIECE IN THIS IMPORTANT SERIES: