The biking wunderkind

I'm not the first person in my family to have a bike accident. My sister, I think, had done this in far more spectacular fashion than I ever have. In fact, her last was caused by a giant piece of steel falling out of the sky from a nearby demolition. If that's not spectacular, I'm not sure what is. And most everyone that she tends to associate with these days, all being biking types with closets stuffed with Lycra, has probably come by a fair amount of road rash honestly.

But I may have the dubious honor of having had 2 total wipeouts that were completely and utterly unprovoked. They say that Sartre, apparently, at one point just keeled over on his bike without any sign of provocation, and when questioned, replied, well, "my mind was elsewhere." So I'm sort of like that, only without the world-historical groundbreaking philosophical thoughts.

For the first one, I'm pretty sure there was an ever so slight glaze of rain on the road. A drop or two anyway. Since I was on my way to teach my writing class to a bunch of U of Texas undergrads, I dusted myself off and tried to keep my back to the chalkboard, so that the skid marks wouldn't be quite so evident. For my travails, I earned a cast on my wrist. Careful observation suggested that most of the other kids at the pool with similar injuries were 14 year old skateboarders.

So last week, the second installment. I've never been good at muli-tasking, really, so it was obviously foolish to try to do it while riding around on my bike. While trying to pull on a glove, my wheel turned quickly to the left, and....splat. Major wipeout, in the middle of a parking lot no less. A confused foreign student who happened to be walking by nicely approached to ask if I was OK, befuddled, no doubt, by the inexplicable source of my predicament. He obviously couldn't see the invisible wall I had just bonked into.

Despite an irritating scuff on my brand new pants, and a weird bump in my wrist that I'm trying to ignore, I seem to have survived this time. For my Christmas list this year: protective gear.