Riding on the Rims Part 2

Last night (Friday) Pete said ‘How about we go over to the markets at Lawnton in the morning? We can leave right after breakfast,’

I said yes, that would be fun. But in my mind I was thinking of the basket of washing in the bathroom. And the pile of dirty mops and cleaning rags from our jobs during the week .Not to mention the mess on the lounge room floor.

See Paddy has an upturned cardboard box – his little cubby house – which he chews to pieces with great gusto. It’s our answer to having our furniture chewed. But every other day I need to clean up all the little bits of cardboard from the floor, and I mean all over the floor, not just in his little spot on a mat in the middle of the room. He has a way of spreading it everywhere.
Oh and the dear little fellow had managed to sneak off with a crust from a piece of toast and taken it up on the sofa to eat, so the arms of the sofa and part of the seat was covered in powdered toast.

But I managed to drown out the little voice in my mind and we did go to the markets, and it was a very pleasant outing. We got a bit of exercise walking around all of the stalls and we stopped to chat with some people selling birds. Three of the birds were the same breed as Paddy, but one was a Cinnamon Conure, which is a completely different looking bird, although he certainly displayed the same kind of antics. All he wanted to do was play, hanging upside down on his perch and chatting away in his birdie babble to Pete.
We got some lovely bananas, a book for Pete and a sweet treat for our morning tea. And, when we came home, there was still plenty of time to do the laundry and to clean up the mess.

Sometimes we can miss out on a whole lot of life because we are so regimented in our thinking. To me Saturday morning seems to be the time when I should do the laundry and the housework. Now when I worked full time, commuting back and forth to the city each day, Saturday morning was really the only time I had to do these things.
These days, with our contract cleaning work, I have much more free time so it really isn’t imperative that Saturday morning is set aside for housework. Yet it was still the first thought in my mind when Pete suggested an outing. Regimented thinking, see?

Okay, so it might sound a bit sad to you that my idea of Riding on the Rims is leaving the housework to go to the market, or going bird watching instead of hunting for jobs on the internet. It probably would have sounded pretty sad to me a couple of decades ago too, but happily I’m at a stage in my life where it really doesn’t have to be all high drama and wild excitement.

No, it’s more about making the most of whatever opportunities we have in life to enjoy ourselves; to escape from the humdrum, even if only for a couple of hours and do something different – something that will refresh and energise us to get back to it all again later.

©Lyn Murphy 2012

Riding on the Rims

They were probably around 10 years of age - a group of boys in scruffy clothes, who had gone into one of those Discount Stores at a local shopping center, leaving an assortment of push-bikes, skate boards and scooters on the footpath outside.

We were coming out of the nearby Fruit and Vegetable market when they exploded out of the store, snatching up their various modes of transport and charging off in such haste that one of them knocked over a display basket on the footpath.

Now I guess we were both expecting someone to come rushing after them, shaking a fist and threatening to kick their backsides if they came back again – but it didn’t happen. Either we misjudged them and they were just full of youthful exuberance or their transgression went unnoticed.

What didn’t, and absolutely couldn’t, go unnoticed was the awful racket they were making as they fled. The noise was obviously coming from the beat-up cycle ridden by one of the bigger boys. I quickly saw, and pointed out to Pete, that there was no tyre on the back wheel. The boy was riding the bike on the bare rim – the metal scraping and grinding against the footpath.

I saw it in my mind’s eye – it’s school holidays and the ‘boys’ are off out and about – probably to the skate park – or wherever the local kids choose to hang out. But this boy, let’s call him Scott – his bike is missing a rear tyre.  It can’t be patched any more, Dad says. The rubber is perished – just plain worn out. We’ll have to get a new one – but not this week, Scott. We just don’t have the money.

Well next week the holidays will be over. He needs his bike right now. It’s just too bad if he ruins the wheel completely by riding on the bare rim. It’s just too bad if he cops a serve from Dad when he finds out. All that matters to Scott at that moment is having fun with his mates.

When we are very young we simply live for the moment. We really don’t have the ability to look ahead and consider the consequences of our actions.  But when we’re much older we see things differently. We are so aware of the risks – of all the little things that could go wrong and the damage that could be done by that brief moment of hedonistic impulse.

A couple of weeks ago, for example, Pete decided to take us driving down a narrow winding track through thick rain forest. All I could think of was the fact that we had no reception on our mobile phone. What if the car broke down? It was raining. We were miles from anywhere. It should have been an adventure – a bit of fun on a Sunday afternoon – but, for me, it was all quite nerve wracking. I couldn’t relax until we were back on the bitumen once again – with a couple of bars showing on the phone.

How nice it would be to find that delicate balance between the impulsiveness of the young and the caution of the more mature? We don’t need to go riding on the rims.

©Lyn Murphy 2012