In Brooklyn, you protect what’s yours, no matter who’s trying to take it. It can be a a girl, a car, a laptop, your hat in a January breeze coming off the Narrows, your dignity.
And in Brooklyn, if you want to keep your bike, the pizza delivery guys and bike shop owners advise to use this type of chain.
But here, someone’s chained up their sadness.
Pedro left the house one day and got collided with by someone else’s cursory car.
And what do you do when you’ve lost your Pedro at the stop sign at 54th and 7th?
I know I have walked past this corner many times and this was not here. Someone perhaps was not moving past the gravity of their missing of Pedro and had to do something. Something was just not right until Pedro’s girlfriend, handball partner or father found the right way to memorialize him without a gravestone.
And now, we all - with our bags of butter, milk or beer - we have to stop. Here. And sit with Pedro’s Ghost Bike. We give pause to the “hit by a car.” We think about the date. We see the white paint crusting and cracking under the spring sunshine and we write the screenplay. Somehow, we assume this was his last bike ride. Or this bike was a routine thing he enjoyed doing or had to do for work. But really, all of it doesn’t matter.
What matters is what we’re left with of Pedro. And we think. And we feel. And we know. And we respect the tragedy of July 10, 2008 of some stranger that I probably stood in line with buying my tomatoes and half-and-half.
There’s an irrepressible movement to sadness that just won’t pass on without its proper due. Loss deserves its place in the sun. Loss needs attention. It deserves eating the whole pizza by yourself. It deserves screwing up on your taxes and your lover and overcompensating at work to keep from going home to the empty nest.
And the sadness that moves us, moves on us, inside us. As our eyes move up and down this memorial of a bike that no longer pedals a life around - whose wheels are painted shut – it is someone’s grief that runs its warm, sweaty hands against us at this impromptu wake locked up at a corner in Sunset Park.
… so dignified … and so sexy. Yes, sexy in its minimalism and stark black and white. And so scary. And so classy, this memorial. So well done. So much pride. Someone thought about it for a while. In this borough of churches, someone chose not just another gravesite that they couldn’t afford anyway. They chose against a graffiti tag or a wall mural clouded by looming condo development. Someone chose vision and permanency. Someone chose grace.
Someone sealed a nobility in defiant anonymity that stole all my breath away, punishing me with taking for granted my own breath by just rolling on.
In the moment that my dog and I stopped and stared, I felt Pedro was just sorta hanging around, crouched on a curb, smoking a cigarette, smiling secretly … softly. Me, who just sort of got stopped by his life in the middle of the sunniest, warmest day yet this spring.
Stopped by the Ghost of Sadness Unrequited. It stopped me, and it moved me to go all the way home, grab my camera and further memorialize it for you.
Pedro got jacked by Life’s Arbitrary DeSelection. Pedro moves among us no longer.
Pedro got stolen.
But somehow, Pedro’s bike moves us still.
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April 18, 930 AM, The 11th Annual Blessing of the Bikes, New York City
