Everyday Cyclist

EVERYDAY CYCLIST Kmart BSO By Justin Short

MY WIFE IS one hell of a gift giver. Lynn is a The pedal platforms had long since broken massage therapist (with an ad in this issue off, exposing the bare metal spindles that of Out There!) and for years she had a trade slipped off my feet and whacked me in the going with a bike shop owner. Sometime shins at least a dozen times on every ride. I in the dog days of summer she picked my was in my 30s before hair started growing on brain, and as far as I knew we were “talking my shins again. bike,” a favored activity of those stricken As demoralizing as it was to ride that bike, down by Obsessive Compulsive Cycling I still rode it every day because there were Disorder. (Incidentally, there’s a hilarious adventures to be had and sketchy board book of the same name written by Dave ramps to hit. I had been begging and pleadBarter available at Auntie’s Bookstore.) ing with my parents for a new bike for several

I’ve watched Lynn’s eyes glaze over many a time enduring my extended metaphor soliloquies on gear ratios, head tube angles, and BSO IS A BIKE tubeless tires. Then six months later an obscure 172.5 mm cyclocompact crank set or a Long Haul INDUSTRY TERM FOR A “BICYCLETrucker touring frame shows up under the tree. And I thought we SHAPED OBJECT” were just talking bike; she blows THAT ONE BUYS IN A my mind every time. Experiences like that take me DEPARTMENT STORE back to my childhood when I had ridden my Kmart bike into oblivion. The frame had been broken AND WORKS JUST FINE AS LONG AS YOU and welded twice, it wasn’t quite straight anymore, and the drive DON’T RIDE IT. train skipped more than not, causing me to whack my knee on the “goose neck.” (That part of the bike that months, but when Christmas morning came, holds the handlebars on and was designed there was no bike under the tree. I tried to specifically to destroy your knee when the put on a happy face, my mom, seeing right gears skip.) That thing’s called a stem now. through it, told me we could save up and get me a bike by summer. I sniffled out a few tears at the thought. I didn’t even need a nice bike. Sure, I’d been drooling over a few of the “bike shop” bikes, but I’d be just as happy with a Kmart BSO. (BSO is a bike industry term for a “bicycle shaped object” that one buys in a department store and works just fine as long as you don’t ride it).

We were living well below the poverty line in rust belt Pennsyltucky, so I didn’t expect more than that. Mom kissed me on the head and sent me down to check the fire while she got breakfast on. I moped back up the basement stairs a few minutes later, “Did you check the fire?” Mom asked. “It’s cold, GO CHECK THE FIRE!!” Back down the basement stairs I went, lower lip protruding, I turned on the furnace room light and there it was. I have no idea how I missed it, because it was leaning up against the coal bin I’d just grabbed a scoop of coal from: the $243 and 67-cents Hutch Pro Raider, the sweetest of all the bike shop bikes ever I’d seen.

I ran screaming jubilant screams, cheeks now streaked with tears of joy, into my Mom’s arms, then dragged the new bike outside for a wheelie session that has continued for 40+ years. //

Justin M. Short will be out there bike commuting in rain, hail, sleet, snow and muck all winter long, all the while smiling ear to ear.