i wonder if a baby is aware enough to feel her first feelings–apprehension, curiosity, interest, fear. or if she just rests. nature’s hormones helping her to just sit back and relax until it’s all over.

knowing that my son listened to the patter of shower hitting my belly as he was born (that was the only way to calm him down as a sick newborn), i think that babies are more aware than we think.

we come into the world riding a cycle, a part of it, creating it, noticing it.

spring is rebirth. all of us have been born before. and will be born again. spring just reminds us.

before the joy of new life,
there is quiet
contemplation.

… when people were asked to engage in a bit of mental time travel, and to recall past events or imagine future ones, participants’ bodies subliminally acted out the metaphors embedded in how we commonly conceptualized the flow of time.

As they thought about years gone by, participants leaned slightly backward, while in fantasizing about the future, they listed to the fore.

That’s fascinating. It tells me a lot about my body, body memory, and the words we use for movement. We understand language, ideas, the world in part through our physical bodies and the movement of our bodies. We yield and open to each other, to concepts, to conversation. It’s not just a question of body language being independent of mind, something that happens when you aren’t looking. It is that movement of the body is an integral part of feeling, speaking and apprehending language and, further, the world itself.

The body’s movement is language. Movement is understanding. Understanding arises in and from movement. The presence and possibility of such bodies is awe-some. Understanding, speaking, being in the world is literally a sustained sequence of movement: a dance. When dancers talk about pedestrian movement, we often mean movement that originates in every day life, that doesn’t necessarily belong to a particulary movement vocabulary. Embodied cognition makes that even more true.

But what about disability? What if your body doesn’t or cannot do what researchers would “expect.” Does that mean that you don’t understand in the same way or cannot process or develop moral cognition? Not being a specialist in the field, I don’t have access to most of the research, but the little available on the web was provocative. Michael Anderson lays out the issues:

… first of all, that no researcher in, or theorist of, embodied cognition has ever suggested that physical handicaps imply cognitive deficits. Nor, if there were differences in the conceptual contents or structures of differently abled individuals, would one expect them to be detectable at the level of the linguistic mastery displayed in conversational interaction (the usual evidence offered by those who object to EC along these lines).** Language and linguistically available concepts are highly abstract phenomena; one would therefore expect the criteria for participation in a linguistic community to be likewise somewhat abstract. Thus, the concept of ‘walking’, in so far as it is logically and semantically related to various concepts of movement, and given that examples of walking exist in, and can be easily seen in the environment, ought to be easily acquirable by an individual who cannot, and who perhaps never could, walk. The concept can be placed in a logical and semantic network which is on the whole grounded, even given that there is no specific experience of walking which directly grounds the concept. Everyone is able to understand things which they have not directly experienced, through imagination, analogy, demonstration, and testimony; the physically disabled are in this regard no different.

** (is to a footnote: “assessments of children with spinal muscular atrophy bear this out”)

I support his conclusion, but not, of course, his language. Walking, it turns out, is less about the planting of one foot in front of the other than the experience and idea of moving through space at a certain time. Granted what you see might be slightly different if you are sitting in a wheelchair from what you would see at, say, a height of 6″ 2′. But then, it would also be different if you were 5″ 4′. And no one would argue that people of “only” average height are unable to develop effective cognitive strategies.

So, yes. It comes down to the act of moving your body. Interesting to find that there is a scientific way of expressing what I thought was only an artist’s take on movement (link here is to an earlier post in bfp’s rethinking walking series). We who move through the world experience the world differently, travel differently, but engage in the same moral and intellectual process of cognition as we go.

I also rather liked the disability rights perspective here as articulated by Jackie Leach Scully (I so liked much of what I could get from the google books clip that I have ordered the book. It seems to put together other thinkers that I am familiar with in oh-so productive ways. hooray!). The excerpts are full of paragraphs like this:

Suppose it really is the case that preflective moral cognition is mediated through sensorimotor pathways mediated by the body interacting with the environment, and that this happens differently when anomalous interactions are involved. It would still be true that adaptions of the environment are a distinctly formative of moral cognition as morphologies, movements or perceptions themselves. It certainly cannot lead to the essentialist conclusion that there is a “disability brain” or “disability mind” that is unlike, or should be treated as unlike, the brains of “normal people.”

I am going to go out on a limb for a second. From studying the history of race and bad evolutionary racial “science” in the early twentieth century, I am wary to make any kind of argument about the connection between brain and disability. Remember the awful stuff about cranium size and race as a justification for why African-Americans could never attain full citizenship. Actually, even now if you do a google search on cranium size and race, you get a series of pretty nasty links, including one to a David Duke site. No link love from me, here.

But I also feel awkward about saying that all brains are the same. These days, we happily accept the idea that all minds don’t work the same way, and we value (except perhaps in grade school) the things different minds do. If we believe that disability is a social construct, made up in part of the negative judgments we impose out of fear and goodness knows what else, what would happen if we admit that brains — like minds and bodies — work differently, that such difference is a social benefit of the highest order, and that we aren’t so filled with fear that we have to denigrate people because their brains are different and work differently? Would difference matter in an objective sense?

What could difference could create? What would we have to set aside in order to see disability brains and minds as powerful creative forces, equal to those of non-disabled people? What if we explicitly worked on movement and cognition, if we could take classes in refining movement with regard to cognition and vice versa? Encouraged people to move and think?  What if dancers were critical to a new society?

Wheelie spins and leaves to go to studio.  I have work to do!

x-posted at my blog here.

I think the short answer is that I am stuck.  That of course is not so much a place as a statement of condition. I hope that the distinction will help me move beyond the sensation.  For stuck, I am.   At West Coast, we often play with stuck or bound movement; that contradiction seems useful, too.  In class and on stage, it always generates interesting movement both to dance and to watch.  How you move when you are stuck is the key question, no?

Mostly, I have appreciated the idea that in my dance life (as opposed to my former life) there is nothing but the present, the next movement, the next project, the next class, the absence of planned career and target lists, the absence of stress, the  ….  And mostly, I have been able to commit to the utter and incredible singularity of each of my daily experiences.  That’s a new for me (I’ve been a follow the rules/worry about the next thing girl all my life). So, let me come clean.  I have no reason to complain about being stuck.  I am where I wanted to be; I worked to be here.  And I will work harder to stay here.  I even kind of feel it is wrong to feel stuck because I am dancing unbelievable work with unbelievable people.  Dancers would kill to be in pieces by choreographers I have had the honor to dance for.  And believe me, honor is an understatement.

And yet, I feel stuck.  (I don’t mean to sound whiny, honestly; I am trying to access a complicated feeling about how to develop as a dancer and person this year.)

While I enjoy the experience of being in the present, I also realize that I have nowhere else to go (that thought that makes me worried.  Will I always be here doing only the daily?  What if?  Worse, what when….?  Am I trapped in the present? Should I be planning/saving for the future?).  My skills are limited: I am not so much a creator of work as I am an interpreter and realizer of other people’s visions.  I am a tool, literally, but probably not in the negative common use of the word.  Understand, please, that I don’t find that a bad thing.  It’s what I am best at in this field; it’s where I find the most pleasure, and my pleasure in my work is what keeps me here.  And yet, this particular skill set is also one of the things that prevents me from doing many other different things.

I want to work at the highest possible level; that’s where I am.  (There aren’t that many places for a disabled dancer to go at a company level and I have been too shy/injured to build networks of other people to move with — should work on changing that).  So, here, I am.  At the very best place to be.  I am not a starter upper — I won’t be starting my own company or even be doing significant amounts of my own choreography.  I am not a fixer-upper, either.  In addition to the work, I have to think of the other side of the coin as my body.  That’s not just my job, it’s also me.  I have to recognize that I have physical limits — and I don’t mean my disability: grin — that’s part of my job.  It’s that I need a body to live with when I am done with my job.  So, I have to remember that I should not be doing certain things (like slamming onto my shoulders or torquing my hip).  I am recognizing that my current approach to dancing — hard on, full out  (or perhaps I have my prepositions mixed) is perhaps more suited to someone in their twenties and less appropriate for a (wannabe grand) old dame.  There’s a reason so many dancers don’t dance at my age; it’s that the body cries in the morning when it gets up and cringes through rehearsals.  Even the adrenaline of performance can seem insufficient.

So, I have to grow as a dancer before I discover that I can’t do it anymore.  I have mapped out for myself a set of things to achieve and accomplish this year.  Some are classes to take; some are new conversations to have; some new experiences to extend my range.  If I can do these things, I will be happy — and I can use the tools that I will have learned to in all walks of whatever life I happen to be in.

In addition to whatever happens next, I also have to plan for disability itself.  If I trash my shoulders dancing, I won’t have them for mobility when I am sixty. It’s all very well to say, but there will be powerchairs …  There may or may not be, depending on how access is granted to this wonderful device.  I can imagine a world where my insurance company says, “You know, you did this to yourself in an unapproved use of your chair.  Don’t expect us and your fellow citizens to pay for it.” “But it was ART,” I will weakly protest.  “Yes,” they will say, “and this is the budget.”

The other thing is pain.  I am so scared of reinjuring myself and of the pain that comes with it.  Accidents happen, but stuff shouldn’t happen because I wasn’t focused or wasn’t taking care or was simply doing stupid stuff.  I am so scared of pain.  Every small twinge has me running to the heating pad, the ice pack, the hot pool, the …  pain has a way of getting inside my head and freezing me.  And at this point, even the things that are disability related pain and not dance-related pain are scary.  I know that they aren’t the same thing.  I know that disability related pain doesn’t mean that I am hurt; it just means that I am hurting.  Different thing.  Different, brain, really.

Taking care of yourself as a dancer is a necessary precursor to the acts of creation that people see on stage.  Non-disabled dancers go through years of training so that they come to know what their limits are, how to take care of themselves, and how to prepare to dance.  Disabled dancers don’t show up with years of training.  We have to figure out our limits (what, I shouldn’t have done that! If I want to do that, I should use these muscles?)  It is also a kind of responsibility we have to each other in the company; we don’t have understudies.  (Runs to ice her shoulders and her hip just in case.

So, this year, I have to grow.  I have to grow for myself as a dancer and thinker.  I have to grow as a writer.  I will take on new projects, ideas, experiments.  I will allow myself to fail, to be told “NO.”  (Well, all right, “no.”)  And maybe, just maybe, at the end of the year, I will have dug deep enough so that I will not only be unstuck, I will be have seen the curtain go up on new vistas.

X-posted at my blog.

If you can’t afford a zine now (and lord knows, I know how that goes!) just know that you will always be able to get the current zine {(re) thinking walking}–I will just have to print off some copies before I send it out!

~en lucha!

I haven’t gotten myself a paper cutter (good holy god those things are *expensive*!!!). But I did get the last batch of zines cut by the official cutter man at my local office supply store. And that made a huuuuuuuuuuuge difference in the overall appearance of the zine. Oh, and I *also* got this zine (stolen sharpie revolution) from C/S distro. Which spends some time talking about/giving advice on “zine layout” (among other things).

I think part of what my zine was struggling with was the layout–I was working with quarter pages (of a standard sheet of paper), and getting all the different quarter pages printed off so that everything went in order etc. was *incredibly* fucking difficult for me. The most time consuming part of creating the zine.

Following the layout advice from s.s.r., I got the zine layout down such that even if I did have to use scissors to cut it, the cut would’ve been a single cut right down the middle, instead of me having to look at every single sheet of paper to make sure I wasn’t cutting into words or pictures. So if you are ADD like me, or have some other sort of issue with being able to organize things spatially and logically–I *highly* recommend getting stolen sharpie revolution!

Anyway–I took my bundle of zines to the Office Supplies store, and the guy working the printing machines sliced the entire bundle in about two seconds all for two dollars. I would prefer to not have to spend that money at all–but for now, while I don’t have my own paper cutter, it’ll have to do. And I must admit, it was highly worth it.

Like I said, the difference in the zine is astounding.

But… I am not sure I like it.

The zines that the last group of people are getting are like a real booklet. The pages all line up together, you can tap the booklet against a table or something and they all line up again, nice and evenly. The folding of the zine was much easier, as all the page sizes matched. I didn’t staple it (an artistic choice that many may not agree with), but now that all the pages are even and clean cut–I don’t know as if it makes much of a difference that it’s not stapled.

I think that there are a lot of benefits to this new clean cut version. And seeing as the critiques that I did get about the zine were mostly about the uneven disheveled appearance–I think it’s good that I figured out this layout/paper cutter style.

But…I admit to having a soft spot in my heart for the uneven unstapled disheveled looking zine. I love texture. That is one of the main reasons I have fought so hard to get this zine done and keep plugging away at it even though it was biting me in the ass so often. I love the texture of zines. One of my favorite zinesters gave me one of her zines out of her purse one time, and it wasn’t stapled, it was sorta crunched up from being in her purse, the pages didn’t fit together cleanly–and to this day, it is one of my all time favorite zines.

I love the feel of the crinkles in my hands. I love needing to rearrange the pages with every page turn so that I can read what she has to say. I love that when I am finished reading, I have to sort of organize the whole booklet again and tap it all together. It’s sorta like a reading ritual. Like, her thoughts can’t be forced into this neat clean package. Like her thoughts are resisting in a *physical* way. Like I am learning a new way to read.

I won’t be arrogant enough to say that my “unclean zine” invokes that sort of feeling in readers. In fact I got a pretty emphatic “I am very frustrated trying to read this thing!” from a dear friend!!! Lol.

But I will say that while I am deeply impressed with the clean cool lines of a good layout and a massive paper cutter–I do enjoy the intimacy of working with my thoughts with my own hands–even if the result is a bit of a mess. (oh, alright, maybe a huge bit of a mess!!! lolololol).

One thing I *do* really like is that I feel like the physicality of my zine actually (re) thought walking as well. I love that it changed and morphed from one set of buyers to another.

Ahhh, impermanence, says the shiny eyed Buddhist bfp.

Oh, and I am working on my next zine! I think it’s only going to be a small run–as I am going to be using a bunch of yellow fabric that I found at a second hand store. So each zine will be hand made by moi! Hooray! But also *booo* because I can tell already, my hands are only going to be able to handle so much of this gluing and sewing and sticking thing.

I’m excited to see how it all goes. How about you? What are you dealing with now in your creative life?

And I am not looking for only positive feedback! If you want to say it sucks, please do so–but please tell me specifically what sucked and why so that I can start working on that particular thing for my next zine!!!

Oh, and if you’re a newbie zinster like I am, or an old timer–PUHLEEZE share some of your own experiences with us!!!!

AND–if you want to order your own zine, click here!

The first zine hand made by brownfemipower, the editorista of the blog, Flip Flopping Joy. Featuring continued commentary in the manner of (re)thinking walking, this zine grapples with brownfemipower’s place as a survivor, Latina, Chicana, immigrant, sexual, organizing, moving mami.

Cost: Baseline=$1.00 plus $1.00 for shipping U.S. 2$ for shipping outside of the U.S.! If you feel it is worth more, please consider paying more! All collected monies will go towards maintaining this website (webhosting services) and the creation of future zines!

Delivery Info: I will be sending out zines every Monday and Thursday. Latest order times for each date will be 8 PM EST the previous day. So, if you order your zine on Sunday at 7:35 PM EST, your zine will go in the mail Monday.

If you order your zine any time on Monday, however, it will be put in the mail on the very next Thursday.

I am doing it this way so that my helper can help me make sure I have all the organizational paper work-y type stuff (for example: correct addresses, etc) taken care of properly.

Once I figured it all out, I will get the information on how to order one out to you!

I thank you deeply, WCD for sharing pieces of yourself with us–and to your grandma, hugs and love and songs as she moves where she needs to go.

“You can’t go out,” she kept saying. “I have to keep you safe. The street in’t safe.” And how I wanted to walk. I wanted to escape that apartment that we were in hour after hour, day after day. I couldn’t eat because I hadn’t moved. I couldn’t breathe because we couldn’t risk opening the windows. But I wanted more than to walk away from my work; I wanted to pull on my jogging shoes and run. It wasn’t safe. I didn’t know it then — I thought she was exaggerating — but overall crime rates in my grandmother’s neighborhood were shockingly high, even for the early 90’s. So, we couldn’t just walk.

I paced the apartment. I started a routine. I would jog in front of the window. “Don’t open that. Get away from there. They can’t know you are here.” Then, I would walk back and forth, reimagining the sweat of frustration and cabin fever as the aerobic burning of calories. I was studying and writing papers while staying with Grandma. Grandma, I recall, knew how to walk; she got on her tiny rowing machine — a device that someone had left in payment for the clothes she had sewn. “One foot in front of the other,” she called, laughing at the delicious irony. We exercised together, but I felt cooped.

I was studying hard for qualifying exams. I had gone through sheaves of notes and was still poring over my appalling scrawl when one night she tapped me on the shoulder. It was humid and hot, a typical East Coast summer night; we had no A/C, the neighbors added their music to the stultifying heat. She waggled what we in our family call the “Jamaican finger” (don’t ask) at me: “We goin on de street,” she declared.

I sighed, frustrated. She’d been at my back all day: “Are you done yet?” I’d tried several times to explain the complexities and competition of academic life to someone who left school at fourteen to be a seamstress. Her family couldn’t afford the education for her to be a surgeon; she figured sewing clothes was the next best thing to sewing bodies. I didn’t want to stop; I was getting somewhere. Finally, however, I saw the hurt, hope, and mischief in her eyes: we were going out.

My grandmother is a lady of style. She has CLOTHES. She made them all herself in glamorous Jacqueline Kennedy style. She needed only to see it once, and she could make it and several variations on it. I found her in the closet looking for a visor and sneakers. She bundled on several layers of mismatched clothes. Rags that she would rather have used as dusters. “We goin’ on de street,” her voice said, as she tossed me some things neither of us would be seen dead in.

I barely recognized her. Gone was the strut that came with her heels and in its place an urban shuffle. Head down, sneakers up, she snuck down stairs and on to the sidewalk. Nonplussed, I copied her. “My gran,” she nodded to anyone who made so bold as to speak to her. And we walked. Across the road. Into the wetness.

The first time, we hit a MacDonalds for fries. We were bad. Then, it was ice cream — double bad. Her eyes glowed. Then, I tried chocolate tofutti (god knows why), but somehow that didn’t sit well. “Need to take a cleanse,” she said, holding her stomach. Over the course of the summer and, indeed, the summer after that, we ate every flavour of ice cream that the shop-rite could offer. She didn’t like strawberry, but vanilla and chocolate were fine. Caramel was only OK, but mint chocolate chip was special. Her neighborhood didn’t have much. I learned that Burger King had terrible fries, that KFC was worse; MacDonalds and Wendys passed muster. We walked from apartment to store and back. That was our routine.

My grandmother’s condition is deteriorating rapidly. She’s at that point. It could now be quick (interesting that quick is the Old English word for “life”), or it could be weeks. Months, it probably certainly is not. She’s significantly disabled and on top of that has several intense medical conditions that prevent me from caring for her; she lives in a home in the community where she spent the last 25 or so years of her life. She used to have friends and connections who would visit her. I live across the country; I didn’t want her to be alone in California, away from the voices of folks from her part of the world. I wanted her to be among the people whose lives she affected, who brought her work — people with whom she worshipped and broke bread.

Her doctor said today that her life has no point. I was too stunned to respond; I politely thanked her for her help and hung up the phone. The doctor meant in the medical model, of course. A life has to have a function or a reason to have a point. Grandma has had no “function” or reason to live for years, apparently. And in addition to external stimuli and connections, she also meant that Grandma has no internal motivation to live (not sure how she could tell that).

It’s true that Grandma’s body has changed and that she doesn’t live as she used to or even see the people she used to. Her friends have died or gone to their own residential care centers. Her facility is not easily accessible by public transit (sigh); most of her friends depended on the bus. Simultaneously, Grandma herself has become less able to travel. I would have liked to move her closer to me, but I didn’t recognize the window of opportunity passing. I should have moved her while she was in the period where she was still able to interact with her friends. Medically (as opposed to disability), she is no longer able to handle either a commercial flight. Nor does she have the health or life skills to adapt to life in a new place. She is too disabled by her most aggressive impairments and too sick from other illness. Moving her across the country poses (so I have been told) a significant risk to her life. So, Grandma has stayed on the East Coast. A friend of the family visited/s often and was/is a local contact.

As we walked in the heat of summer, I learned about her wishes — perhaps her fears were her fears or perhaps they were her illness speaking. Either way, the woman who once had wished to be a surgeon wanted no medical interventions: no knives, no tubes, no drugs. Her faith — a hyper literal form of Christianity — was an important strand in her decision-making. God would call her when He was ready. The body is a shell: burn it. Don’t sit and watch me die. I want no fuss. No party. No mourning. She would be ready to move on.

Who knows what should be counted as a reason to live? Who knows what counts as medical care and intervention? Principles are one thing; circumstances are another. Would she, in extremis, change her mind? Would a feeding tube become desirable? Could we resuscitate her?

Do Not Resuscitate — check.
Do Not Hospitalize — check.
No Extraordinary Measures — check.

“Believe and you will receive. Doubt and you go without.” — OK, Grandma — check.

But it’s also a cultural thing as well. For example, there is a long history of low-rider-car-loving-teen-coming-of-age time in U.S. Mexican cultures. Mexicans can fix any damn thing on a car with some duct tape and a hanger. One of the few times that my father felt like we girls *had* to get equal treatment with the boys in the family was when he showed us all how to change the oil in the car. Apparently, ruining a car through unchanged oil is a greater threat than female liberation.

And ain’t nothing look as good and as sexy as a finely dressed hombre standing next to his finely done up car waiting to take you out on a long night on the town.

Cars are how masculinity is understood, how boys become men, how the rest of us decide who is impressive and who is not.

So bikes get little air time. I know a whole bunch of older Mexicans who have never ridden a bike. Ever. Hell, I know a Latin@ who is my age who never had her own bike until she was in her thirties. To be clear, I’m not saying no Mexican or Latin@ ever rides bikes…I was riding bikes from the time I was a small kid. I’m just saying *culturally* and *economically*–Mexicans are not known for their bike riding.

It’s hard to be macho, to put that important show on, when you’re riding a bike. It’s hard to peddle with style when you’re wearing cowboy books and have your tejano hat on. For real.

***

A scene: When I was in Boulder Colorado, there was this park that I would walk through everyday to start a long hike up a mountain side. There was hardly anybody there on weekdays, but on the weekends, every Mexican in Boulder was there. If there *is* a best thing about national parks, it’s that if they are close enough to home, it just takes a little ingenuity to create a whole day of good times for very poor people. There was fishing and eating and dancing and Frisbee throwing. One family was sitting tightly packed on a small bench, and laughing their asses off every time the young son popped a rubber toy at people walking buy. The sun was brilliant, the air was warm and dry, and when you looked up, there were those awesome Rocky Mountains watching you.

As I walked out of the park and up the pathway that wound through the mountains, I noticed a young Mexican girl on a bike. She had long ink black hair and was wearing pink shorts and a stripped shirt with spaghetti noodle straps. Her bike was one of those old beat up banana seat kinds–the kind that was really popular back in the 70s. She was fat and had light brown skin–and she was flying down the pathway, peddling as fast as she could.

I smiled as I watched her, she reminded me of myself–still at the age where she’s oblivious to the societal mandates of what “fat brown bodies” are supposed to do and be. Free.

The path began it’s ascent, and I stopped watching her to focus on getting my own butt where it needed to go. When I say you’re going up mountains in Colorado, I mean you’re going up mountains. A “hill” is really a paved mountain that will hit a 90 degree angle after about three or four feet. When you’re used to “hills” being something that your kids roll down for fun, this type of hill is a bit intimidating, to say the least.

As I was chugging up this hill, I noticed that the girl was not alone–her father was behind her, and because the ascent slowed her down, had just caught up to her. Her father was one of those Mexicans…one of those Mexicans who maybe wasn’t born on a bike.

He was wearing blue jeans, work boots and a nice shirt. And was clearly more than a little uncomfortable trying to get that bike up the hill. With a few quick strides, I had caught up to him, and only because I had sympathy in my soul and a history of being lapped by walkers while on my own bike, that I didn’t charge past him.

I heard a bunch of clicking and cursing, and knew that he had changed gears–I snuck a few looks over to him and saw his feet peddling madly and his bike barely moving. He was on first gear.

His daughter was not so lucky. Kid’s bikes assume a lot about what kids need as they’re climbing up mountains, I’m telling you. She was going so slow her bike almost tipped over. Twice.

But by that time, her father was going so slow when he stood up on the peddles to try to go faster, he *did* tip over–after his foot slipped off the peddle and almost slammed him face first into the handlebars.

Which, of course, caused his daughter to laugh.

But as she laughed, she stopped next to her father, offered some encouraging words and began peddling again. The father realigned the bike, got his feet firmly planted on the peddles and pushed off.

I have to say I admire the dude. If you have ever tried to move a bike on first gear up a mountain while wearing blue jeans and work boots, you know he was working a feat worthy of Lance Armstrong’s admiration.

And that he and she were both doing this while surrounded by white, trim grandmas in spandex, bikers on thousand dollar bikes, runners with pure bred dogs –all of whom were going faster than they were–it’s like they were facing down the Apocalypse of hell.

But the thing is, after the daughter started laughing–the father got moving again, and then he started laughing too. His entire persona of bad ass macho Mexican man was completely obliterated–in front of a bunch of rich white people no less–and he was laughing. A daughter was watching her father fail miserably at being a bad ass macho Mexican man–and both he and she were laughing together.

***

After a little while, the pair stopped their trek up the mountain and got off their bikes. They walked the bikes around until they were facing the opposite direction. I could hear the labored way the father was still laughing and trying to catch his breath at the same time.

They each got back onto their bikes and then kicked off. This time, there was no struggle–the bikes slowly rolled at first and then were flying. As the girl passed me, her feet were up on her cross bar and her hair was streaming behind her. She maneuvered easily through the speed walking grandmas and thousand dollar bikes.

The father kept his feet firmly planted on the peddles. He called out a few words that I didn’t understand, but that I assumed were words of caution to his daughter. The high screeching sound of of breaks controlling descent followed him all the way down the mountain. He didn’t go as fast, and he didn’t move as easily through the crowds.

By the time he reached the bottom of the mountain his daughter was well ahead of him. He eventually melted into the rest of the crowd and I didn’t see them again.

As I turned and continued my walk up the mountainside, I couldn’t stop smiling.

The world can be righted.

My feet beat the words into a rhythm on the sidewalk.

The world can be righted.

~en lucha