The Man with the Pink Bicycle
By Elizabeth Yeter
On my way to work this morning, I noticed an older man with a shiny pink bicycle crossing the street. It was a beach cruiser style, and although it was lightly raining, I imagined him riding merrily on the boardwalk, his grey hair tousled by the ocean breeze. He was walking the bike across Lomas street, a relatively busy thoroughfare with two lanes in either direction in addition to a center turn lane which he was stopped in as I drove past.
As is the case with most mornings, I was pretty much on autopilot. Drop off kids, navigate my way out of the crazy school parking lot, right turn onto Lomas, slow down in the school zones, stay with the flow of traffic. My mind ran through the list of things I needed to do for the day. I won’t bore you with the details of my work life, but all this to say that it was a small miracle that I even noticed the man and his bicycle.
My day went relatively smoothly. No major hiccups or confrontations. No highs and no lows. Nothing to celebrate and nothing to be disappointed about. I maintained the status quo and, quite frankly, I was happy about that.
As I slumped into my car to drive home, I put a mental checkmark on another day successfully survived. I pulled out of the parking lot and began the mindless journey back in the direction I came from that morning. Right turn onto Lomas, this time headed in the opposite direction.
Except this time I couldn’t be on autopilot. At the conclusion of that turn, I was met by a fleet of police cars parked strategically to divert traffic into one lane in each direction. No emergency vehicles, no urgency in the movements of the officers milling around, and no crunched up cars. What’s going on here? I asked myself. My line of cars made its way slowly toward the scene: a procession navigating past a small black fabric barricade.
And I didn’t have to crane my neck to see what was poking out of it. Laying on its side, next to a large bump covered with a blanket, was a bright pink bicycle.
I gasped. No, it couldn’t be. Just this morning he was alive and happily crossing the street in the exact same spot. And now he was just a body laying beneath a blanket waiting for the crime scene investigators.
I burst out crying. I wasn’t the only one. On the sidewalk were several people huddled together dabbing their eyes. Not relatives though, just strangers who happened to witness a tragedy and were trying to process it together.
Where had the man with the pink bicycle gone all day? Was he, like me, on his way home from work, simply reversing the direction of his commute as I was now, when he was struck down? Or had he spent a day with his friend on the other side of Lomas and then headed home, unaware of the peril that awaited him?
I remembered a scene from the movie Schindler’s List about the holocaust where Schindler sees a little girl in a red coat. His attention is drawn to her as she walks through the town, just as my attention was drawn to the man with the pink bicycle this morning. Later, Schindler looks with horror at the lifeless body of the girl in the red coat being transported in a wheelbarrow. Spotting the pink bicycle laying on the ground had the same effect on me. The shock of seeing someone alive, of noticing them, if even for just a moment, and then knowing they are now gone forever, is burned in my mind.
The silver lining to this dark cloud is that up until the moment we die, we each have an opportunity to be fully alive. If you’re reading this, you’re still alive. As I’m writing this, I’m still alive. I want to do more than just go through the motions. I don’t have to scrape by on autopilot. Every moment is a gift. The days are not something to survive, but something to enjoy and be thankful for. Seize today. Take it captive to your dreams and your desires. And treat the tragedies you encounter - the red coats and pink bicycles - as beautiful reminders of the fragility of life.