Bobbers
In her later years my mother owned 17 feral cats and a bunch of dogs. Some big drooling mongrels, a poodle, a Llaso Apso, some terriers, a Chihuahua. You know. Or maybe you don’t. But this didn’t seem terribly odd to me as my grandmother lived the same way when she was in her 70s and 80s. What did seem odd was that this particular grandmother was not my mother’s mother; it was my father’s mother, a woman my own mother had always claimed to despise for living in an oversized and rundown Victorian with innumerable cast-off pets. My mother always said my paternal grandmother was a lunatic, yet here she was, elderly and living exactly like her. Anyway, I went to visit my mother one day and saw a dog I hadn’t before noticed. It was an elderly border collie, very friendly and sweet, and my mother had tied a red bow around her neck. I said, “Ma. What is up with this dog?” My mother said, “Her? Oh, she just wandered into the house last week and made herself at home. Now she sleeps on my bed. I call her Aunt Lucy, and she answers to it!” (My mother always wished she had an Aunt Lucy, so be careful what you wish for.) And that was the end of the conversation.
So goes the story with this awesome bike you see here. It landed on my desk one day in the form of a disk and here it has sat forever. I have 213 photos of this bike, all taken by our photographer in Europe, and all I know about it is its name, Chocolat, although my secret name for it is Aunt Lucy. It’s a gorgeous bike, don’t you think? The longer it has sat here the more I’ve thought what a shame it is we can’t run this truly great bike. Then today I thought, to hell with it, let’s run it anyway. (And when I say “lets” I mean me.) Maybe someone will cyber-step forward and say “Hey! That’s my bike!” and we’ll find out more about it.
I weighed the pros and cons of running a bike with no specs, no owner’s name, no nuthin’. Possible Cons: Publisher will fire me. Nah, he’s the one who gave me the mystery bike in the first place. Besides, I’ve been fired and re-hired for way worse things than this. Way worse.
Possible Pros: The mystery of Chocolat Aunt Lucy becomes solved, the builder steps forward, and I get a second story out of it and, possibly, a reward.
My guess is this bike lives in Europe somewhere near a dance hall where a small child with a butterfly net plays on it (please see photos and you’ll know how I’ve come to this conclusion). If this is your bike, or if you’d like to have a go at guessing its life story, please send it to me at wenmanning313@aim.com with Mystery Bike in the subject line. Let’s see if we can solve this mystery or, at the very least, come up with a good lie.