The Year the Lights Came On

The main road in my town is on the top of a ridge, like Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles but without the view of Hollywood. It's an old Cherokee trail, I hear, and from its vantage point you can see down in the valley, although there is no river, just a long row of power lines, which always remind me of Terry Kay's touching novel, The Year the Lights Came On (about when electricity finally came to the poor side of a rural Northeast Georgia town, the same year the main character, an 11-year-old boy, fell in love for the first time). A calf-busting steep hill, illuminated by a crescent moon and the brightness of Polaris, gets us out of our neighborhood and onto the ridge. Then, a long, fun, who-needs-amusement-parks descent on the other side of the road where hardly anyone stops to let us cross, even though we ride out of our way to go to the crosswalk, gets us to school.

On the ride home, alone, the sun pops over the horizon as I blink the blinding light away and soak my exhilerated muscles in its sudden warmth. Passing a line of bumper-to-bumper cars filled with office workers drinking coffee and talking on cell phones, I smell the cloyingly sweet aroma of honeysuckle yet again, like the smell of Dunkin Donuts when you ascend from the Long Island Railroad on track 19 at Penn Station in New York.

And in that moment, when I turn into my neighborhood for the final gift of a downhill and stick my nose into the wind like a dog in the backseat of a 1970s wood-paneled station wagon, anything is possible.

And I think about the reports that came out this week, nothing new, really, that our nation's kids are not getting enough exercise, and I hear the parent who told me that his child earns this or that, I don't remember, an iPod perhaps, if she rides her bike to school ten times. I hear Ralph Waldo Emerson's words in my mind right then. The reward of a thing well done is to have done it. And I want to shout, "The reward for riding to school ten times is riding to school ten times."

I take a final, wide turn into my driveway, and lean into the momentum so I zip up to the garage with no effort at all. I squeeze my brakes to stop, kick down the kickstand, snap off my helmet and shake my hair loose. I have been to school, to Los Angeles and to New York in the last 40 minutes. I have traveled with Cherokees, touched hearts with great writers, and even discovered my inner Bassett Hound. No. I don't need an iPod.

The Year the Lights Came On