January 19, 2023
Cyclettes, by Tree Abraham
I don’t think I could write a memoir through bicycles, though I’d like to consider it—the ten year gap following the birth of my child would be conspicuous though, and there’ve been other holes. I’d have to write about leaving bikes in the driveaway that my parents would back over. (When’s the last time I just dropped a bike somewhere? From Cyclettes: “In suburb childhood when we were done with our bikes, we could smash them down on the front lawn or driveway or any old place we pleased…The bikes were not a thief’s commodity; they were ours like a worn pair of shoes shaped to our foot’s print.) I’d write about our bicycles in Japan which we rode around with in the company of our friends (I think I rode in a car not even five times during that time) like a pack of suburban kids, and the freedom of those days (and also the impossible feat of the obachans who managed to ride in the rain while holding umbrellas). About the metal basket on my bike today, a bike we only got tuned up in the midst of the pandemic when it seemed impossible to go anywhere any other way, and how wonderful the world feels when my basket is packed with things like donuts, potato chips, or library books. I’d think about all the bikes I’ve had throughout my life and where some of them might be now—the bike from my freewheeling fourth year in university lived in my shed until last summer when we finally put it out in the garbage because the tires were shots, and it only had one pedal, having long ago been pilfered for parts.
I loved Tree Abraham’s Cyclettes, a beautiful amalgam of text fragments and image that is to bicycles as Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Studies was to swimming. Abraham takes her reader from her Ottawa childhood (showing stills from a video of her very first bike ride) through childhood and adolescence, and across the world as she works in international development, living abroad and travelling extensively, riding bikes, observing bikes. Following her path, coming of age: “My heart beats so strong it resounds as gong. I am flying. Only the bike can keep up with the exhilarated acceleration of my spirit.”
Her impulse is to go, to ride, to render the world whole and wide…until she arrives in New York City and finally stops, her first big ride to the beach, to the sea, full page spread of her handlebars and the beach—what a TRIUMPH. (Pun kind of intended.)
