In the fall of 2015, as close to my son’s birthday as I could get it wearing my universe-ordering pants, the International Men’s Bike Race came right past our street. That’s right—the 88th World Road Championship chose Virginia, zeroed in on Richmond, and then laid out a 20 mile (33 km) course through Hanover County. As a further nod to the 10-year-old in us all, the county closed the surrounding roads and cancelled school in the middle of the week. What joy! Does it get any better than this? I followed up with a boys’ “birthday block party” (since we were blocked in for six hours, no exit or access in or out of our neighborhood to the race route) and invited a dozen or so preteen boys to come early that morning with helmets and wheels to tear up our backyard and wooded trails—and to help birthday boy eat an enormous tire-shaped cake.

At the appointed time we biked the kids to the end of the street and staked out our spot to watch the race. Neighbors had started to congregate; impromptu tents and lawn chairs dotting the sidelines, air of excitement and neighborly cheer. Big kids waving flags and little ones on their trikes, scooters, strollers—an all wheels offering to the impending Men’s Elite Time Trial. It was like a cross between the fourth of July and the Christmas parade—a small town’s ticket to ride. Here in this once-in-a-lifetime event, the best of (semi) rural Virginia opened to the world at large: over 700 registered riders from 76 countries and 40 trade teams from all over the world, all screaming by in their brightly colored jerseys and flag-stickered bikes. Shoulder to shoulder, wheel to wheel, making a noise like a rushing train over shouts from the crowd as the peloton came into view and sailed past, Whoop! Whiz! There goes Paraguay! Zoom! That’s Italy! That’s Denmark! Wow! Man, look at them go! BTW, Slovakia won.

They’re no dummies, these planners of international bike races, for they picked the most beautiful road in all of Hanover County. Mine. It winds through hilled woods and shady knolls, curves round a little gorge that all but dries in the summer also occasionally floods and overflows the bridge, closing the road. Once, coming home late at night after a 10-day vacation up north (and a nine-hour drive), we came upon the barriers and washed-out bridge and had to back up and go the long way around. Look what I didn’t do while you were away, said the little bridge. Oh yeah? said Hurricane Irene, and stole the bridge away. Then the county threw the problem on their fix-it list, probably the same day four years earlier when Richmond put in a bid on that road race, closing our back exit route for a year or so, which was glorious. Now my biking household could ride the closed road previously verbotten. A personal bike park paved at county expense void of all car traffic for over a year, leading to a construction site??! It no get any better than this. Sure, son, you can ride the main road unsupervised. Sure! Go for it! It was a wondrous time to be a biker at our house.

I want to throw a little of that good fortune Will’s way tonight, years later, as he receives, and then almost loses a new bike. The mountain bike he has waited months for—okay, two months, five days, seven hours and 45 minutes for—came in yesterday. I took him to Richmond to bring his baby home. Today, it is not working. Yes, you heard correctly, it is not working. After dinner last night, after just sitting in the garage for a while staring at it, marveling over it and reveling in a younger child’s experience of mine, Will decided it was time to take her for a spin. So we all went for a ride around the neighborhood. Or rather, Bill and I went for a “ride,” two old fogies pedaling along behind what appeared to be a flying machine with a boy perched on the top of it: sailing off embankments, leaping culverts and drain pipes, sweeping the neighborhood in a rush of power and joy. Used to be I’d fuss at him for using the neighbors’ driveways, brickwork and fancy cobbled entryways as his personal BMX track. Now, since he’s clearing these features with feet to spare and spanning 12-15 feet jumps before landing, I can hardly fuss. Ahead of us he is gone in one fluid streak, a spontaneously choreographed speed race through our neighborhood, wild and free. Like an un-stringed kite on certain wind.

But what’s this? Close to the end of it, our outing, here is our Icarus in the middle of the street, not fallen but also not mounted, studying the mechanics of his bike. The cog, the wheel—no, closer in, it’s the shocks. Is something wrong? Silly mommy, standing there in her yard sale helmet and $90 used bike special. The heat of the evening, once dissipated now shrink wraps me. I stand by, helpless, watching him bent over the bike, tinkering, not talking. All of the energy is sucked out of the moment. He looks up sadly: You guys can keep riding, I’m going home. Okay, you sure son? Hey wait, what??! Who smashed our kite? Am I or am I not wearing my universe-ordering pants? He didn’t walk it home, but I watched him ride slowly away, the defeat and sorrow clinging to him as he hunched over the handle bars and pedaled home in a straight line. No more flying boy.

At home the situation wasn’t much improved. He had garaged his new pride and joy and was mysteriously upstairs on his computer, Googling and emailing and calling the bike shop, which obviously wasn’t answering on a beautiful Friday evening. But one of the “friends” he’s made from emailing throughout the week did respond that night, using such words as “manufacturer’s defect,” along with the most depressing news of all (why I oughta close your road…): “Best not to ride till we look at it.” What!! What??! You did “look” at it, you put it together, you ordered it for us, and we all been “looking at it” for two and half months! This is our one shot, our one clear 24-hour period to ride it. Can life really be this cruel? Boy goes to bed utterly deflated. Tomorrow, Saturday, was his only day before leaving for Boy Scout Camp for a week. He and Bill were on their way to Belle Isle for a planned test run of his new beauty, gloves and helmet laid out on the kitchen table, picnic going soggy in the fridge. In my world of eternal hope, stay the course at all cost, they will simply “stop by” the bike shop for a quick tweak before keeping their plans for the day. In Will’s mind, and probably Bill’s as well, since they both know more about air pressure and balancing shocks than I do, he is going to have to surrender that bike.

There is a kids’ story I am thinking of about a man who falls out of a plane and is psyched to break the fall with a haystack on the ground, only to notice a pitchfork in the haystack; is relieved to overshoot the pitchforked-spiked haystack only to be greeted by a tiger….something like that. Here, I looked it up:

Fortunately, Ned was invited to a surprise party.
Unfortunately, the party was a thousand miles away.
Fortunately, a friend loaned Ned an airplane.
Unfortunately, the motor exploded.
Fortunately, there was a parachute in the airplane.
Unfortunately, there was a hole in the parachute. *

Sorry, no spoiler alert for how the book ends. If your glass is half empty, as mine often is, the title would be UNfortunately.” Lucky for kid readers everywhere and a fuller-glass perspective on the world, the title is not that. It is Fortunately. All does work out, in the end. But what a journey getting there! The emotional whiplash has me worn out. The book captures a little how I am feeling on this international psych race, of who will win full misery soonest. It is really hard, standing by. All that morning, Will is sofa/cell phone boy, laying full out like he might on a sick day, completely out of steam. No, he didn’t eat breakfast yet. No, he doesn’t want to. The camp gear is unpacked, the day unsung. Can we stand it? Bill and I make conversation with our eyes because (a) no one wants to speak the reality into more being than it already is and (b) I can’t figure out why my guys aren’t in the car and halfway to the bike shop just as they are unlocking the doors on this beautiful Saturday morning. Bill translates Will’s silence for me: Unfortunately, the guy they need to see doesn’t come in until 2:00 pm. OMG, I need to go find the bamboo rods we were using earlier this week to poke up our fingernails. Paaaaaiiiiiin. At a little after 2:00 he half-heartedly straps the bike back on its car rack and climbs in beside Bill for the repeat trip to Richmond. Bike store will be closing soon and I know Boy is expected to surrender his new wheels for “another week” —or “maybe two,” they said. What?? I am wearing my universe-ordering pants, here, people. You are supposed to consult me on these things. We have a family bike-camping-but-mostly-biking trip planned for first thing Monday at THE state park boasting the most black diamond trails. As in, first thing, no time for “in the shop.” Where is my well-planned life and what have you done to it?

Probably you’ve heard by now what happened at The Tour de France on Saturday—crash and burn not once but twice, within an hour of each other. On the first of 21 stages a massive crash on the opening morning, and one even more serious in the the next hour. Forty-five km from the finish line at Landernau, a German biker collided with a spectator’s cardboard sign she was waving for TV crews and took out dozens of racers in a domino effect, sending bikes and bodies spinning through the air. A lifetime of training, a moment honed to its magical and most enduring best for this—all gone. How can this even be? Ask any 2020 “graduate” I guess, born in the shadow of 9/11 and coming of age in a global pandemic: there is nothing in all of life that is guaranteed. Like the emails coming from the high school last fall: we’re in full pandemic mode last year, right, fully masked and socially distanced, restricted, restrained, all but locked down in the building and still, mixed in with the daily emails alerting me to new cases and the dozens of students immediately quarantined, come those cheery any-year alerts to let us parents and legal guardians know that they will be conducting a tornado drill or active shooter drill. Seriously, people? (Weeping smiley face emoji here). People! Please! Surely we have reached our disaster quota this year. Surely. Put that stuff away till next year. But instead, disaster compounds disaster and I have to step back from the flying bikes or be consumed. Will, my son, I’m so sorry I kept this from you while we were touring life from that helicopter: There is no ends to the stuff that can go wrong.

What I want is for the damn world to be a little kinder to this, my son. To all my people, for that matter. A little gentler, softer and forthcoming with its riches. Or I want it to work as hard for the good as they do. Alas, it does not, and from here at the halfway mile marker, it is growing bleaker by the day. When I go out to the garage at night to hone and polish the blades on my helicopter, I know…I know I’m not supposed to fly that thing. I’m supposed to let life dump its unmerciful mess all over the ones I love and just stand by. Just stand by watching while they pick themselves up, untangle their bikes and be on with the race. And, in that process pull up the others falling all around them. For truly, who really rises up alone? And, like the Tour de France, who goes down alone? If the pandemic has taught us anything it has taught us the depth of our connections, many of them unseen. Speeding along in glory and gratitude last night, with the long-awaited wheels finally under him, we are spun out of control by this one sideliner. If nothing else I will give him this: the will (See? I no name him Steve for a reason) the Will to hang on. To persevere. Out of the blue (where else does wisdom come from?) a dear friend calls. Here’s a cool thing, she says. Her pastor preached it last week. You know that verse in Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”—You know that one? The word used for “hope” in that passage, in Spanish translates to esperarse, which is a verb meaning “to hang on.” Cool huh? To hope is to hang on.

So this is our ticket out of the disaster and defeat: this very physical act of hope, which will look very much like waiting and perseverance. This is why in some of the footage from the finish at The Tour you see the racers coming in with torn clothing and their arms and legs all scraped up with road rash. The Frenchman who won that stage, Julian Alaphilippe, crossed the finish line with blood streaming down his legs. Remember life as a battle? Remember? (See Spotify Girl May 2021) Boy, my boy, get back on that bike and ride. And so he does. Later that evening, a little after closing time at our new BFF bike shop, I get a very happy text from Bill that the unbelievable (and unexpected) has happened: they fixed it!! Their “top shocks guy” has taken a look and better still given the time and better still (aka fortunately) taken Will to the shop in the back to take apart the shock and repack it, showing him how, showing him what was wrong, helping him learn the intricacies of his new machine, and they promise if it happens again to bring it back and they’ll install a new shock right then and there. No waiting. No weeks on end. No supply line song. Just DONE and good to ride. Fortunately. In some circles, a situation so fully restored it is better than when you started is called this: redemption. Here is what I say to myself in times like these: Fortunately, there is a God and I am not him.

And like that, boy is back. He is ecstatic he can hardly get the words out fast enough when they call me on the way home. Earful of bike tech later, I am just walking up with the mail when they pull into the drive and I see Will rocket from the car, unloose his bike and throw his leg over the frame. In a flash he is over the bank of our front yard and gone, following the last light of the day and chasing dreams.

This has been a high adrenaline week, to be sure, and moving at the speed of light such as we are, I can barely make out its remains in the rearview mirror. At 6:15 Sunday morning he rises as if called by silent bike whistle to the garage, and he’s off for an early morning ride before I have to take him to the camp carpool. Ahead of him, a four-hour drive to west Virginia and a high adventure camp. You know what? I don’t care what heights, might, manpower and challenges they throw at him all week, we have already lived all of it, for free, right here in our own garage. He’ll be the one laughing in the rain that cancels some fun thing, or unfazed by lighting strikes that haul them off some large, great, wonderful course of this or that. He’ll be the one to thank his God for the privilege, the privilege of being alive. Watching Will’s scout caravan pull out of the parking lot/meeting spot early Sunday morning my heart does a little leap. After I pray for his safety and give thanks, I think to look up the weather to make sure the heat and storms will behave themselves. Remember, the disasto-meter seems set to “high” these days, so micro-manager mommy likes to be in the know. When I key in the zip code where he is headed, the exact location pops up on my phone: Mt. Hope. I kid you not. Step aside, people, step aside for the One who is wearing the universe-ordering pants: my son will sleep at the base of a place in West Virginia called Mt Hope. Right near the town of Pax.

“May the GOD of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” Romans 15:13.

* Fortunately, by Remy Charlip (Simon and Schuster, Sep 12, 2017). For watchers of the universe for meaning (such as myself), that there—September 12th—is William’s birthday.

Photo by Travis Saylor on Pexels.com