17 May 1999: Helmets

Thursday at work I developed a cold such that I wimped out of biking home. This year Denver has put bike racks on all its buses, though, so my bike and I could go home together anyway. I put my bike on the rack and was allowed on the bus despite not having my Eco-pass with me (the eco-pass lives in my backpack, not in my wallet, never in the pannier).

Usually if a driver lets you on without a pass it's because you're a familiar passenger. That wasn't the case today because the driver was new, so new he didn't seem to know the route: someone asked if the bus stopped at 9th and another passenger, not he, answered. But I sat sniffling in my seat, read England, England, asked myself why I didn't clip my helmet through the strap of my pannier, and told myself that I didn't do this because I wasn't going to leave the helmet on the bus like a ninny, was I?

Yes.

The driver continued not to know the route, not to take the right turn he should have toward the end of my ride. Pannier over my shoulder, I moved to the front of the bus to make sure he took the next right to rejoin the route and get me home. That's when I left the helmet on the seat, since I hadn't clipped it to the pannier. The drive made that next right (asking if he'd missed any stops: yes, two) and then tried to take a left instead of continuing straight, and in order to go straight intstead of left as he first attempted, he veered rightward out of the left-turn only lane, nearly ploughing into an SUV before braking abruptly for my stop. Heart in my throat, I reminded him I'd have to detach my bike (which was directly in front of him so maybe he'd see me too and not run over us both). So I got off, without my helmet; tossed my pannier on the sidewalk, not noticing the absence of helmet; detached my bike, still forgetting my helmet; and only when I straddled my bike for the short stretch home--after the bus had driven away--did I realize I had no helmet. Damn.

So I was as much of a ninny as the driver. A helmet might protect my brain but evidently the content of said brain isn't worth saving.

Not that I wanted to ride much this weekend, but I certainly want to ride when I feel better and I certainly did not want to spend oodles on a helmet. I bought that helmet at an end-of-season sale for 75% of its full price, and it's a good helmet. How much is your head worth?

So Friday morning, at home, I called a friend at work and asked her to inquire at the bus station (which is quite near our building) after noon, when the previous day's leavings would be available. I'd forgotten she had a noon flight to wherever her conference was, and so she couldn't.

This morning I stumbled off the bus, waited in line reading Waiting for Aphrodite, and had my turn at the counter. It turns out it was a good thing my friend couldn't go, because she wouldn't have known what route or time the bus followed, and these were the identifying questions the clerk asked. I told her, and she went and looked, and I waited at the window, telling myself I had no expectation of the outcome. She came back, carrying my beloved helmet.

Hooray!

I left voicemail for RDC, which he hadn't got by the time he called me for his usual daily good-morning call. He was all happy too, because it meant we can afford for him to get me something fun for my birthday instead of something practical like a bike helmet.

I came into work still all sniffly but grinning, peeling the sticker with the route number and date off the dome. A sweet woman about my mother's age came around the corner, heard me sniffle and saw me fussing with the helmet, and went all aflutter asking if I'd spilled. Nope.

This winter a polar bear had another pair of cubs. She abandoned her last pair, which zoo staff raised; this pair she's caring for. They've gotten old enough and she secure enough that they are now on display. I'd love to see them, despite my zoo guilt. The interesting thing about this is that no one knew she had mated or was pregnant. It strikes me as odd that the bears' behavior isn't monitored, but since obviously the male and female get along, I guess no one worries about hostility, and since they're bears, I suppose no one invades them for blood samples very often.

After reading The Door in the Wall recently and wondering if such a mediocre book took the Newbery because it had a crooked protagonist while fear of polio still gripped the world, I researched polio vaccines and also the history of vaccination and variolation. I had known about the U.S. Army giving smallpox-exposed blankets to as-yet uninfected American Indians, but I had always assumed they were blankets merely used by smallpox victims. No. Whoever did the giving went so far as to dust the blankets with ground-up scabs and pus from smallpox pocks. So the Army didn't just maliciously deliberately give already-infected blankets but even more maliciously infected clean blankets themselves. Well I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free...

That song comes to my head in times of anti-patriotism because while I sometimes surprise myself getting teary-eyed hearing "The Star-Spangled Banner," that song chokes you with the same chauvinism. I can forgive chauvinism and religion in "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," a Civil War song. I can't forgive a song from the 1970s for promoting only one way of being American. "This land is your land, this land is my land...."

Anyway so today I'm looking into the Thirty Years War, whose causes I forget. Something about defenestration and the Hapsburgs against the other, Protestant or Lutheran, German states. The first site I found is hosted in Denmark. It features a British English far more fluent than my Danish (which is absent), but still quite amusingly clumsy.