The following is an article I wrote for the July issue of Family Pulse Magazine. You can view it online and find it all over Reno, Sparks and Tahoe.

Though summer was late in arriving in Northern Nevada, it’s finally here, and it’s great weather for cycling with the family. But for kids that are too small to ride their own bike there is some equipment and strategy necessary for having fun while rolling around the parks and events in Reno and Sparks.

Once your child can sit up on his or her own completely stable, and they are physically big enough to fit into a helmet, they’re ready for at least simple rolls to the park. Be sure to check with your pediatrician if you are not sure if your child is ready for a bike ride.

There are three basic options for carrying your kid with you on your bike. There are seats that mount to the handlebar, or behind you on a rear cargo rack, and trailers that follow behind the bike. Each has their advantages and disadvantages.

Rear Mounted Bike Seats for Kids

Vanessa Vancour and her Husband Matt haul their daughter Billie around on a rear mounted seat on their Electra cargo bike. “We bike a lot to down town,” she says. “A lot more in the summer.” The bike is modified with an Extracycle rack that extends the length of the bike and allow them to cary additional cargo. “This has taken her and a white water kayak in the back at the same time,” Vancour says.

Most driving trips are short local jumps to the store, school or daycare that are perfect for bikes. Vanessa takes a lot of trips to the grocery store with Billie on the bike. Most days I pick up my son Bowie from daycare by bike as well.

Traffic is a huge concern as well. ‘We try to take more the back roads, or what we call the scenic route,” Vancour says, “to avoid all of the traffic.” My routes with Bowie are fairly conservative as well. Don’t hesitate to use the sidewalks when necessary, or cut through parks to save exposing yourself to more traffic.

Kid Trailers for Bikes

I use a Burley Solo trailer for taking Bowie to and from day care. There are several advantages to the trailer including the fact that it has a water/wind proof cover which keeps him warm and dry. Also the trailer holds him and all of his gear including his car seat. Also, trailers hold a child low to the ground with two wheels so that even if the bike falls over, they stay stable and upright.

The disadvantages of the trailer are that it is heavy and has a bit of jerky feedback as you ride. It’s fairly far behind you so you can’t just reach back and check on your child. “We preferred this over a trailer,” says Vancour. “Just to have her that much closer.” Many people feel like their child is too exposed to traffic in a trailer, but it is a larger more visible object to motorists than just a bike, especially if you run a whip and flag for added visibility.

Front Mounted Kid Seats for Bikes

The third option is the European style seat mounted to the handle bars. My sister and brother-in-law, Carrie and Dave Bushá, use the iBert Safe-T-Seat seat for their son Elliott. “the steering is very stable,” Carrie says, “And the baby’s weight is in the right spot.”

Carrie and Elliott riding with the iBert bike seat

Advantages of this setup are that your kid has full unencumbered view of what’s ahead, “He loved being right out in front where he can see everything,“ Bushá says. They are really close to Elliott and can easily interact with him while they ride.

Disadvantages include having to modify your riding position and cadence depending on your bike. Since the seat is up in front of you, there could be interference with your knees, with more weight on the front tire, it can be hard to lift the wheel up over obstacles, and the mounting bracket is heavy and stays on the bike when the seat is detached.

Dave and Elliott riding with the iBert seat

Cycling with your kids is easier than you think. Any of the local bike shops will be able to help you pick out and order a carrier or trailer and helmets. And as with anything, don’t force it. My son was super into it from day one, but if they aren’t into it, hold off. Chances are your kids will quickly learn the joy and exhilaration of cruising on two wheels!

Resources for Biking With Kids

Front mount seats

1. iBert Safe-T Seat
2. WeeRide Kangaroo
3. Kettler Bingo
4. Yepp Mini

Rear Mount Seats

1. Yepp Maxi
2. Topeak Babyseat II
3. Co-Pilot Limo

Helmets

1. Giro Spree
2. Bell Splash
3. Nut Case Little Nutty

This originally appeared in Mountain Gazette in 2005 or 2006. It used to be live on their site, but was taken down when they updated it. I thought of this because my mom sent me a link to this NPR story about the origins of  ’Take Me Home Country Roads’.  -M

John Denver Anonymous

The girls remember CDs in the bronco, but when I close my eyes and think of John Denver I’m in the red and white VW buss we had when we lived in Michigan and drove out to Colorado every summer. The heater didn’t work, that won’t surprise anyone, but we had an 8-track player and a John Denver tape, cassette, I don’t remember what they were called. It was an old van even then, and when we moved out to Colorado my parents bought the bronco with a one-speaker AM/FM cassette radio.

This all came up, I have to say, after hearing John Denver on my IPOD just now. I’m thankful it was only that, my own private headphone concert, not a blaring faux pas over PC speakers. It was a live recording of Country Roads from who-knows-where. I don’t know how the track got on my computer, but Itunes thinks it’s Ice Ice Baby. Either way, I knew what it was, and sitting at my desk off the main laboratory I fought back the vocals.

My name is Mike, and I like John Denver. There: it really does feel good to get something like that out. And I won’t apologize or feel ashamed. My music collection kicks ass. I’ve got everything from Ella Fitzgerald to Alice Donut. Nine inch Nails to Garage A Trois. Django Reinhardt to Theivery Corporation. I know my shit. Nevertheless, there’s a John Denver track on my IPOD, and my only regret is that it is the only one there.

Eventually the little holes in the dashboard of Dad’s bronco filled with dirt and leaves and the speaker gave out. No more JD or anything else. But that was the truck that got the whole family to the mountains to go camping and climbing and biking and hiking and skiing. So he had a nice CD player and in-door stereo speakers installed. He even got the add-on speaker boxes for the back seat so my sisters and I could hear. We bought CDs: John Denver’s Greatest Hits: volumes one and two. That and Full Moon Fever could get us from Bakersfield up to Dome Rock and, to my mother’s chagrin, back.

It would eventually come around to Country roads as we were on Western Divide Highway a few miles from Dome Rock. It was like the finale of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” with five sweaty and restless people belting out, Almost heaven/ West Virginia/ Blue Ridge mountains/Shenandoah river.

Now, I should say that none of us has ever been to the places in that song, but a country road is a country road. You can get a rocky mountain high in the Blue Ridge, or the Sangre De Christo or the Sierra Nevada. And the dirt road to Elephant Knob, with it’s switchbacks and water-bars, and steep hills mandating a high clearance, four-wheel-drive vehicle was powerful because our home was down a four-lane, divided, suburban boulevard to condos with manicured landscaping and a private parkway.

Would it have been the same if it had been Dwight Yoakam on the mono 8-track, then cassette, then CD? Would I feel like less of a dork if we’d listened to Lyle Lovett, instead of good old JD as we drove down the Porterville highway, or the road from Denver to Buena Vista, or Reno to Bishop? For that matter, could we have built memories and lasting bonds over any recording artist along with whom we all could sing and know every word, chorus and bridge of every song on the greatest hits collection? It’s likely, but we had JD. And, what’s more, we aren’t the only ones.

I’ve heard whispered rumors of other families belting out Rocky Mountain High, and Thank God I’m a Country Boy (I won’t even mention Grandma’s Featherbed.) on their way up to their favorite weekend camping spot, fishing stream, or climbing crag; I’ve heard candid admissions from punked-out twentysomethings having tender coronary regions for JD and Leaving on a Jet Plane–singing plaintively along with Sunshine on my Shoulders or Wild Flowers in a Mason Jar, or tearing up over Farewell Andromeda.

I know you’re out there. You’re not alone.

Well the response to this writing contest can only be described as something else! All in all we had people from Ph.D. atmospheric scientists to executive chefs submit stories.

Unable to decide between the top two entrants, Scott and I, after arguing a good 5 or 10 minutes over email, decided to call it a draw and declare both finalists as winners.

Stay tuned for more fiction contest action from i am indisposed with even more premierness…

So here, for the first time, Winner #1 of Indisposed Fiction, October 2009. Stay tuned for the story from winner #2…

Searching

by John Sagebiel

“Come on, let’s get out of here.”

“Not yet, the lady said that guy is down here somewhere…”

“I really don’t care where she said he was, this place is creeping me out.”

“What?”

“The drawings, the pictures and mostly those eyes.”

“You’re kidding, right? Admit it, you’re bored.”

“No. Now, ‘cmon, let’s go.”

Sandra realized she was beat and decided to go with him. Jim’s always been a pain this way, she thought. He knows what she does, or at least he thinks he does. Half the time he doesn’t want to go on her expeditions, but this time he was really excited. She remembered the day she told him she wanted to go and look in Morocco.

“Morocco!” He’d said with genuine excitement, “Hey, I’ve really always wanted to go there.”

So she agreed. Now she realized what was up. “Casablanca” had always been his favorite movie; he fancied himself a Bogart-esqe character, had the hat, the trench coat and could quote practically every key line from the movie.

Movies aren’t reality she realized, probably too late. Now what. She had tried to find a good bar where she could dump him and let him drink gin and smoke if he wanted to for all she cared. Just like his damn hero in that damn movie. No such luck. He’d wanted to be with her, claimed it was for her ‘protection’ since this is a predominantly Muslim country and they wouldn’t think much of a woman in western dress wandering around talking to unsavory characters. He’d really said something like that, and it just pissed her off more and more as she thought about it.

The truth of the situation was that he wanted her with him. She was much more comfortable than he was traveling in all kinds of countries, and she could handle herself here as well as she had in Jordan, Iraq, and any number of other counties. The reality is that this is the ground-zero of the origin of agriculture, the home of the first people to domesticate plants and very likely the only damn place on the planet where some of these foundation plants were still grown, harvested and eaten.

Not that any of these people would know that term, not that she would ever mention what she does or why she is here. Better just to say you ate the most fabulous thing and had to get the seeds so she could grow it at home. Never mind that she didn’t have a garden at home, never mind that the business card she carried “Associate Professor, Vegetology and Pomology, University of California, Davis” was as fake as Jim’s excuse for leaving that subterranean labyrinth of passages and shops. How do you explain to people?

Mostly she doesn’t. Mostly people are too wrapped up in their small little lives to understand anything beyond the tip of their nose.

“Do you want the reality or the myth?” No, she never really said that. What an answer, though. ‘So, what do you do?’ is such an off-the-cuff question so many people ask at parties. Well, do you? People want the myth, not just about what she does, but about their lives, their existence and the food they eat. Hybridized shit is what she thinks of it. Hardly any of that stuff is going to survive. If people only knew how fragile the system of agriculture we depend on is. Inbreeding is as bad in corn and wheat as it is in dogs and people. Not much strength when the gene pool is shallow. But these few strains are all that’s grown. One hit and game over.

Way back when the people who domesticated wild plants and grew the plants provided not only the food, but the seed to propagate them with. Agriculture was thus born. These so-called ‘foundation’ plants are those that form the foundation of modern agriculture. From these, centuries of cross-breeding and hybridizing produced very productive and very fragile plants many of which cannot reproduce. The Idaho russet potato. Sterile. Commercial bananas. Sterile. The list goes on and on. Finding and saving these foundation plans before they disappear is not just a matter of scientific inquiry, it’s about the survival of humans on earth.

But the gardening story is good cover, like the job. Seed savers, perhaps the last in a very long line of people in that work sometimes can be convinced to part with some of their precious genetic material for a smile and the equivalent of a few dollars. Academics get a fair hearing, if the ‘home gardener’ story doesn’t sell. Good cover, never blown. And, it’s half-true because she has the academic background and the mind for it. Plus someone grows the seeds she brings back, carefully and gently in the finest greenhouses.

Second generation seeds are carefully collected and some are cold-stored. Two years and then back in the ground to be grown, seeds collected and stored again. For how long? Might be a long time, but the science is clear: it’s not a matter of if, but when we will need to go back to the foundation and rebuild agriculture as we know it. Only these people, all sworn to secrecy, all working with cover jobs, all very clear in the mission of their agency, will know how. Like some kind of odd government-run priesthood.

Now that’s kind of funny she though to herself. Not nearly as damn funny as Jim’s excuse for dragging her away from her work, she thought as she slowly ascended the stairs. The small red bag empty for now, but not for long.

She told him she wouldn’t be with a painter who couldn’t commit to one full sized painting. He claimed that his works were full sized, and that when he hung them all together they formed a whole, like the old Star Wars trading cards, or a jigsaw puzzle. She said that puzzle pieces were never rectangles. He said some of his paintings were actually squares, and she said, yeah, all squares are rectangles.

Unrelated illustration by Brian Raszka, www.brianraszka.com

She said she wanted him to paint something on the scale of their king-sized bed, since people pay good money for art that big, as opposed to a collage of twin pillows.

So he bought a big canvass, and built it a frame of two-by-fours and quarter molding. But he had no where to lay it except right on the bed, minus the pillows of course. And then he couldn’t think of anything to fill all that space, which as he stared at it on that scale became as fine and clear as the porcelain front of a toilet tank

Then he realized that even the box spring under the king sized mattress under the king sized canvass was twins working as one, so he took black paint and drew a line right down the middle, then he painted something on either side.

-M

So I get this phone call out of nowhere, and he tells me he wants $100,000 or my girlfriend gets it. “Gets what?” I said, thinking maybe he’s talking about one of those new BMWs cause that I can live with. He says gets it means she gets offed, whacked, done in and I have a pretty good idea what that means. But I’m still kind of bummed about the beamer cause they got good financing going on now.

photo by Triskay86

“What can I get for 1 grand?” I ask. He says he’ll send me an arm. I guess that was risky. You don’t trifle with abductors. I wonder though if the rest of her will be ok even if I can’t have it all. I don’t have to ask though cause when I say what about two grand he says both arms. So I figure that means for Five g’s I get arms, legs and the head. Which means you only get what you pay for so for about 6 grand I get all of them; that I can afford.

He says for six I get everything delivered in a refrigerated truck, and I see that the other 94 grand is for the service of NOT cutting her into pieces. I ask if they’ll take a trade in, cause I got an Audi that’s still worth at least 30K. He asks me who the hell I think I’m fucking with, and I say, “I don’t know what’s your name,” and he doesn’t say.

Then I tell him I’m not that attached to her, so I’ll hand over the 94K, and he can just open the back door and kick her out and not even bother with the refrigerated truck. He must want that beamer too cause he holds to the 100 thou. And he won’t take payments or trades.

So I just cough it up, and now I’ve got a girlfriend. I never had one before but she’s pretty cute, if not fully functional. I wonder how much I’ll be able to get for her.

-M

One of the things that I like about James Thurber is his style. He was prolific in fiction and non fiction. But the style in which he writes is so incredible (not credible) for either that it’s never apparent which is which (not knowing much of the specific time about which he was writing). But truth is so seldom about facts as it is about figures. More about artifacts than provenance. His writing is grounded enough both in reality and farce.

It probably doesn’t matter anyway. The next post down is me copying that style. Right down to plausible details that will make you wonder. Don’t worry. We’ll get back to the topic of scatology next time.

-M

Mr. Monroe Stood fingering some canes in a shop in the Fifties. Canes, it had occured to him, were imperturbable. He liked that adjective, which he had been encountering in a book he was reading on God, ethics, humanism and so on. The word stood staunch, like a bulwark, rumbled like a caisson. Mr. Monroe was pleased to find himself dealing in similies.” from the imperturbable Spirit

When Cybil left me she gave me a copy of Don Quixote in the original Spanish, even though as she may not have known, but certainly should have assumed, I didn’t read Spanish. She was the only woman I ever slept with whom I assumed when I met would never sleep with me. In fact she did more than that. It was really incredible.

I thought about her quite fondly for years years, even to this day cause it’s not like you’d complain when a woman like that ultimately leaves you any more than you’d fault the setting sun. And I kept the copy of Don Q. on the shelf not opening it–merely storing it with all the others I have–and not learning Spanish.

I took I down, though, when I moved out of that old house on Madison and thought about tossing it into the box of old sweaters and coffee mugs that was going to the thrift store. I held it, that thick, impronounceable, unlikely book so unlike the woman who gave it to me. It couldn’t belong to me, I thought and I thumbed the pages back to front aerating them for the first time in 10 years, if it was a day. That’s when I saw the inscription.

To me, of course. It read:

This Book Makes No Sense In English: Love Always, Cybil.

Though now I want to more than anything, I still may never learn the Spanish Language.

-M