ON THE AVENUES: If you really want to be my friend.

Let’s begin with the acknowledgement that social media is one of the best ways ever devised by mankind to enable anti-social behavior.

Can this statement be doubted? You know it. I know it. The man in the moon knows it, and so do the Russians, because after all, they’re watching every breath we take, and monitoring every keystroke we make.

Certain useful aspects of anti-social media are the exceptions that prove the rule; the medium is a fine way to stay in touch with genuine, real-world friends; to share photographs and memories; and indulge in occasional, purely recreational voyeurism.

Guilty of the latter, your honor.

But the worst angels of our nature have long since discovered anti-social media’s proficiency when it comes to the creation and dissemination of odoriferous bile and sheer disinformation, although it isn’t clear whether a platform like Facebook has become a proxy partisan battleground for reality, or the other way around.

Venom, poison and toxicity; it’s enough to make the Grinch’s three-decker toadstool and sauerkraut sandwich with arsenic sauce look more like a Faberge egg.

Sticking to the Facebook paradigm, it is no longer surprising when a complete stranger parachutes into a conversation, dispensing f-bombs, threats and insults, having watched carefully for the perfect opportunity to be the sort of living human penis that we’d quickly eject from the barroom without a moment’s second thoughts.

As the kids say, trolls and their masturbatory trolling (eyes rolling).

However, what still causes me to scratch my head is when this starring role of ill-tempered instigator, played typically by furious white men, most of them old, who case the joint from the very same vantage point in the bushes where they deposit the urine borne of so many Bud Lights, emanates from one who wishes to be known as one of my “friends.”

This strikes me as strange, not to mention magnificently, mentally unbalanced.

Understanding that 40-odd years of cutthroat, robber baron, end-stage-capitalistic and neoliberal economic doctrine has removed most vestiges of etiquette from human discourse in America, it seems to me that “friend” is one of those words that really should be meaningful. Otherwise, don’t use it.

Perhaps what is ultimately most depressing about anti-social media is the cheapening of this word.

I have almost 3,000 “friends” on Facebook, 60-something of whom are dead; allowing for multiple accounts and other weirdness, as well as “friends” who last posted in 2012, the whole shebeen boils down to a few hundred persons known to me on sight, and if defined properly, are in fact casual acquaintances, along with a few dozen more who truly are close friends in any emotionally quantifiable way.

Now, if you’re eager to troll me on Facebook by hijacking a thread – to refer to me as an idiot, a liar, a commie dupe, or any of many other disparagements, all the while waving your arms like a raving lunatic as the accumulated wisdom of 10,001 barnyard sunrises flows from your aged countenance like raw sewage into yonder gently winding river – well, then it’s difficult for me to view you as a “friend” on Facebook, or anywhere else, for that matter.

It would be relatively easy to apply the universal anti-social media solution to this problem by erasing this “friend’s” very existence, and ceasing a dysfunctional ‘friendship” that obviously isn’t, by blocking and publicly scourging the serial offender.

And yet, to me, this course of action is both tedious and unrewarding.

Blocking might remove a squawking troll who lacks basic manners. But it also eliminates my lingering belief, crazy as it sounds, that any of us can choose to accept rationality and change our way of thinking.

Bizarrely, my viewpoint mirrors that of traditional religious faith, in the sense that anyone can be saved, except I reject the supernatural element and replace it with this: Anyone can choose to save themselves, by opening their eyes and seeing another side of the story.

Returning to Facebook, this means that my generally preferred solution is to unfollow those “friends” who clutter my feed with regurgitations of someone else’s falsehoods via memes and everyday thoughtlessness.

“Friends” who are capable of communicating in their own words merit a step higher in my hierarchy; their continued presence is negotiable. We may not see eye to eye, but we’re capable of communicating. As yet, there are possibilities.

But the “friends” who insist on being cancerous conveyors of pure malice?

It’s still a tough call. I don’t go to their anti-social media feeds and raise a ruckus, just as I don’t walk into anyone’s house or apartment and begin spray painting graffiti on the walls or pelting the cat with garbage.

In fact, I don’t even behave this way with non-friends. Why, then, are some of us unable to grasp this distinction? Be my guest and claim that your insanity stems from a love of country. To me it sounds a good deal more like blind fear and self-loathing.

It’s hardest when the trollish, insulting anti-social media “friend” is someone who you remember as being interesting, which in my world usually implies a person I can recall having beers or coffee with, conversing, and being capable of learning something from.

Now these pleasant memories aren’t jibing with the angry electronic interjections, and I’m left to wonder what went wrong. What changed with them?

After all, a mind surely remains a terrible thing to waste.

---

Shifting gears, for a great many years I delighted in informing listeners that I could far easier imagine a week-long pleasure trip to then-hermetically sealed, radically communist Tirana, Albania than being compelled to reside for the same length of time in Jeffersonville, just five or so miles away from Nawbany as the crow flies.

Then Albania went and shook off the commie yoke, and no longer could I use it as an example. When Tirana defected, I had no choice but to embrace Pyongyang as the counterweight to Clark County. It wasn’t quite the same.

Consequently I’m prepared to concede that this joke has long since ceased to be relevant. Living and working in Jeffersonville isn’t far-fetched, especially since my grand scheme of 30 years to render New Albany habitable for intelligent human life has proven to have yielded mixed results, if not outright failure.

The very fact that I cannot risk explaining the reasons for this feeling for fear of reprisals from today’s elite New Albanian cadres, whether political or social, perhaps summarizes the depth of the issue. The prevailing mediocrity is like sand storms in the Sahara.

Back when it all started, a (real) friend used to insist to me that I was wasting my time; New Albany simply could not be reformed, as it persisted in being a dirty little river town, and couldn’t/wouldn’t rise above its underachieving history.

In retrospect, yes. Even before Facebook existed, my friend was exactly right.

In two months, we can expect Donald Trump to win the city of New Albany by at least 20 points, and if Trump manages to secure re-election, the first emissary likely to arrive in our bare city will be Ben Carson of HUD, to be welcomed by our Democratic adfarm-near-me/">ministration and given the ceremonial role of pushing the button to ignite the implosion of low-income housing at Riverview Tower.

Local progressives will say absolutely nothing, because they’re not progressive. The Dixiecrats will chortle with delight, chugging their Lites.

Somewhere, a dog will bark.

---

Recent columns:

August 27: ON THE AVENUES: Structural racism, white fragility, and my old school.

August 20: ON THE AVENUES: When love and hate collide – or, my father and the governor.

August 13: ON THE AVENUES: In My Merry Oldsmobile.

August 6: ON THE AVENUES: Surrender.

Baylor Family Croatia, Slovenia and Trieste 2019, Chapter 18: James Joyce, Italo Svevo and Trieste in the literary sense.

The sun was shining on Tuesday, and we climbed a hill.

Trieste was a place I wanted to visit three decades ago. Accordingly I passed through the city in 1987, after a delightful two weeks in Italy. My dim memory of this very brief visit was that the preferred budget lodging in Trieste was booked; given that I was eager to cross into Yugoslavia, my decision was to keep moving.

In 1987 I'd have known about the Irish expatriate writer James Joyce, but not Ettore Schmitz, a native Triestine who used the pen name Italo Svevo. The story of how these two men met and became friends is the subject of a book I was reading as we were staying in Trieste in 2019.

James Joyce and Italo Svevo: The Story of a Friendship review, by Terence Killeen (Irish Times)

Stanley Price’s book describes how Svevo – real name Ettore Schmitz – gave Joyce Leopold Bloom, and how Joyce gave Svevo fame

The very name of Ettore Schmitz is a testimony to the multicultural nature of the Trieste in which he lived. The Christian name is Italian, the surname is German and the family was Jewish.

His parents had arrived in Trieste in the 1840s, and Ettore (born in 1861) went to a Jewish school there, so his Jewishness adds to the mix of Italian (linguistically), Austrian (by citizenship) and German (by origin) from which he came. In religion he was a nonbelieving Jew who became a nonbelieving Catholic in order to accommodate the anxieties of his wife, Livia Veneziani.

I'd submit that Trieste's multiculturalism is what makes the city fascinating even today.

Joyce came to Trieste in 1904 to take a job as an English teacher. Svevo was older, known not as a writer, but a businessman who ran his wife's family manufacturing firm.

This company had developed a secret formula for maritime paint that kept the hulls of ships free from fouling barnacles and rust -- at precisely the period prior to WWI when an international naval arms race was under way. In short, Svevo's company was making money hand over fist, and soon would land its biggest contract yet with the British navy.

Svevo knew he needed to speak better English, engaged Joyce, and so their friendship began as pupil and teacher.

Fairly early in their encounters Schmitz disclosed to Joyce, who he quickly realised was essentially a writer, that he himself was the author of two novels published under a pseudonym, which had sunk without trace. Joyce was most surprised and asked to see them. He told Schmitz how impressed he was with their dark power, thereby encouraging a delighted Schmitz to write again.

Joyce was too obscure at this time to be able to do much to aid his pupil: his efforts to promote him in Triestine literary circles fell on deaf ears. Later, though, when Schmitz produced his masterpiece, La Coscienza di Zeno, Joyce was much better placed to help him, the upshot being that Schmitz, under the name Italo Svevo, is now recognised as a major modern Italian novelist. Both he and Joyce are honoured in Trieste with statues and foundations devoted to them.

Those statues weren't there in 1987, and I'd have known no better, anyway. In 2019 the writers' memorials were easy to find, and this time I was mentally prepared for them.

Svevo:

Joyce (and above):

I reread Zeno's Conscience earlier this year, then Price's biography of the friendship between Svevo and Joyce. Presently I'm reading Joyce's first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which he wrote while living in Trieste and during the time the two men became friends.

Taking all these factors together, I'm invigorated.

Triestine time was running out, and on Wednesday we hopped a bus to Miramare.

ON THE AVENUES: I'd like nothing more than to go for another ride with Kevin.

ON THE AVENUES: I'd like nothing more than to go for another ride with Kevin.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

My column is a bit early this week, because two years ago today a fine fellow departed Planet Earth. Lightly edited to account for the passing year, here's a remembrance, as originally published on the 19th of October in 2017. 

---

It’s October 23, and two whole years since Kevin Richards died.

I’d like to say my period of mourning is over, but this wouldn’t be entirely honest, as I’m not sure it ever began.

That’s because in a great many ways, I’ve simply refused to acknowledge Kevin is gone forever.

Flown down to Dallas for bar-hopping and a Cowboys game?

Gotten into one of those busy times at the shop?

Slipped out to go for a "century" before supper?

That explains it. He’ll be back soon, standing in the very same reserved spot by the bar. We’ll have a beer (or five) and share all the stories, and the world will make sense again.

Of course, I know it isn’t to be, although one thing is perfectly clear: While I have no issues whatever with the fine people up the hill at Silvercrest, I’m spooked, and in no hurry to visit the facility any time soon.

When Kevin was diagnosed with terminal cancer in August of 2016, he spent his final weeks under hospice care at Silvercrest. Four months later, so did my mother. I’m reasonably sure she was in the same room that Kevin had been, or perhaps the one adjacent to it.

Silvercrest’s staff members were universally kind and compassionate, but the convergence was a bit much. No more, please, at least for a while.

Regular readers know that Diana and I recently traveled to Europe, spending the bulk of our time in Poperinge, Belgium and Haarlem, Netherlands.

Kevin was a big fan of both these places, and when we returned to them a month ago, each bicyclist I saw pedaling past – there were hundreds in all – reminded me of the epic beercycling times we had.

It will surprise absolutely no one to learn that our acquaintance began in the late 1980s over beer, not bicycles. Kevin started patronizing Scoreboard Liquors, the package store where I worked, and after a brief lull (I believe he moved to Indianapolis for a short time) we met again when the Public House came into existence in 1992.

To say that Kevin was a fixture there is to be guilty of criminal understatement, and it bears repeating, now and always: If the pub had its own Mt. Rushmore, Kevin would be one of the four faces.

Beer obviously was a shared theme of our friendship in the early years, and then a bit later, bicycles. Kevin often rode motorcycles, although I’ll always contend that human-powered transport was a better match for his innate, personalized zen. Going for bicycle rides -- and refueling afterward -- suited him well.

I helped get Kevin into better beer. He definitely helped get me into a bike saddle.

A group of pub-going cyclists gradually came together, and one late summer's day in 1999, Kevin and I rode to the top of the Knobs via Corydon Pike's switchback grade. We stopped to sag at Polly’s Freeze, the venerable ice cream haven.

An earnest discussion began. Might we venture a biking trip to Europe?

And -- heaven forbid -- have a few fine ales in the process?

The planning began. We booked hotels at three beer-oriented urban venues in Belgium, along with rental bikes for day trips radiating from each stop. Faxes (!) and e-mails were sent, and the itinerary came into shape. As the calendar turned to June, 2000, there were five of us ready to make the journey, and it proved to be a classic.

A beercycling group was born, and as many as 15 of us took part in a total of seven trips in nine years, with the last occurring in 2008. Kevin was along for four of the seven, and without his guidance, I'd have lacked the confidence to "lead" the other ones, although in fact all of these trips were genuine group efforts.

Kevin and I conceived, orchestrated and performed those beercycling trips together, and while the cast revolved, each time out we functioned as a band of brothers (and on a couple of occasions, sisters).

I’m not exaggerating when I say that Kevin’s bicycling advocacy changed my life. My European travel instincts were joyfully reborn. During previous journeys to the continent, I'd dodged bicyclists while walking between train stations, never stopping to consider how much fun it might be to ride myself.

Correction: Actually, never stopping to consider that I could do it. Kevin patiently tutored me about the art of the possible on two wheels, with or without panniers. It wouldn’t have been possible without him.

By 2003, I was able to take my bike apart, pack it in a hard shell case, reassemble it, ride it all the way from Frankfurt to Vienna (meeting friends along the way), and get the bike and me back home without incident after a month on the road.

As a humanities major with almost no technical aptitude, I've never been more proud of myself, and eternally grateful to Kevin for showing me how.

Our partnership was mutually reinforcing. We’d pause by a river, and I’d prattle on about a Jacobite revolt in a neighboring town. Then Kevin would explain the hydraulics of the locks and dam we were observing. I’d score a brewery visit, and he’d calmly repair a spoke. Kevin had his life, and I had mine. Not all our interests intersected. When they did, life was great fun.

I’ll ride again in Europe some day, even if it’s two miles on flat ground with a rental bike.

It won’t be the same. It can't.

Back in the spring of 2016, Kevin was as hale and hearty as ever. It wasn’t for nothing that people called him Moose. I ran into him one day at the pub. He was in his usual nook spot, hale and hearty, with a pint in his hand. He began prodding me in his mischievous but always purposeful manner.

Had I been riding?

Was I going to start?

Really?

Walking?

What was my problem, anyway?

Kevin notched it up. We needed to get the band together again, and start planning a trip. It might be a simple reunion, or perhaps even a bang-up finale, but we needed to do it soon, before we got too old.

The chat lasted an hour, and I emerged buzzed and enthused. Later I told Diana it was inevitable. There'd be another ride somewhere in Europe in 2017.

Alas, the cosmos had a different sort of journey planned for Kevin, and we made the trip without him, and also without the bikes. Several toasts were made, one with a providential bottle of Westvleteren 12, using the immortal beercycling mantra of Bob Reed.

Here’s to us.
May we never quarrel or fuss.
But if by chance we should disagree,
Fuck you – and here’s to me.

Here’s to Kevin. I miss him.

A lot.

---

Recent columns:

October 18: ON THE AVENUES: As long as the Democratic hierarchy keeps the Human Rights Commission under its thumb, it's hard to be optimistic.

October 11: ON THE AVENUES: Clamming up is hard to do, but I'm trying my best.

September 30: ON THE AVENUES SPECIAL EDITION: As David White's mayoral campaign begins, let's briefly survey the electoral landscape.

September 28: ON THE AVENUES: If this is adulting, I’d rather be leaving on a jet plane.

Renewing friendships in Haarlem. Being thankful. Promising to be back soon.

Marilyn, Inge and Diana.

Previously: Out there in the fields, or a visit to De Plukker Hop Farm Brewery outside Poperinge.

Most of you know that Harlem (New York) derives its name from Haarlem (Netherlands). In fact, Peter Stuyvesant's original Dutch settlement from 1658 was called Nieuw Haarlem -- and "nieuw" means exactly what you think it does.

I've never been to New Harlem. My first visit to Oude Haarlem came in 1987, in the form of a day trip from nearby Amsterdam.

Haarlem in 1987. It looked about the same as now.

Eight years later, I made the acquaintance of a Londoner named Gerald, who is universally known as Boris. He was a friend of a friend, the well-documented phenomenon called Six Degrees of Big Kim.

We all attended a party in Copenhagen hosted by Little Kim. I vaguely recall walking off a hangover the following morning with Big Kim and Boris, prior to hopping a train back to Belgium.

Subsequently I was introduced to Boris' old pal Dewi, a Welshman. Some years before our acquaintance, they'd invested in a house in Bound's Green, an area in north London. In 1998, my cousin Don and I crashed there for a few days.

Dewi has continued to occupy the Bound's Green property at varying intervals, but by the late nineties, Boris had gotten a job with a Dutch company, and he moved to Haarlem. There he bought a flat, learned the language and became a de facto Dutchman, albeit it without formal citizenship.

(Cue a discussion of Brexit)

Soon thereafter Boris met an affable expatriate Californian named Bill, who had come to the Netherlands to work as a cook in a Mexican restaurant. It seems that the "melting pot" isn't an exclusively American concept. Bill met Inge and they began dating. All of them became regulars at a wonderful Haarlem pub called the Cafe Briljant (2002-2017), owned by Rob.

Boris also knew the people who had started the Jopen brewery, and were contract-brewing as they pursued the goal of a brewing facility in central Haarlem.

Concurrently, the era of Roger's and Kevin Richards' Merry Band of Beercyclists had dawned. Thus we came to Haarlem in 2004, where Boris met my friends and we met his, among them Bill and Inge; by this time, they were married. Jopen was consumed, and Rob's bar often visited.

Including 2004, I was to visit Haarlem five times during the next five years. By 2007, Diana and I were close enough to Bill and Inge that we stayed in their lovely house for a few days. It's a place that Bill, a jack-of-all-trades, almost single-handedly remodeled. 

The last group bicycling trip to date came in September of 2008. Six of us (among them the late Kevin Richards) started and ended our journey in Haarlem. Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport is just a few miles away, and a shop in Haarlem agreed to rent the needed bikes.

We rode the train to Poperinge, attended the hop fest, and then biked most of the way back to Haarlem. Before splitting off for further adventures, there was a brief window in which to meet briefly with our friends. It was especially wonderful to see Inge, who was about eight months pregnant with her and Bill's first child.

I returned home, and life promptly got in the way. Bank Street Brewhouse opened in March, 2009, and the demands of trying to get the restaurant and brewery up to snuff intervened. All I can say is that it seemed like a good idea at the time. We live and we learn, etc.

From 2010 through 2012, with neither the money nor the time, Diana and I weren't able to travel at all outside the country. Finally we made it to England in 2013 to visit her relatives, then back to the continent in 2014, though nowhere near Haarlem.

I've often referred to this period of my business career as trench warfare, and while this is too glib by half, it does convey something of the idea of how stressful and frustrating the BSB project proved to be. By 2014, I was beginning to see the handwriting on the stall, and the as yet ongoing business divorce stalemate began in early 2015.

In June of 2016, to the day of Muhammad Ali's funeral, I happened upon Inge via the serendipity of Facebook. While Bill, Boris and Dewi weren't the social media types, I was "friends" with Inge and Rob, although not to the extent of paying close enough attention.

Inge posted photos of daughter Marilyn, and seeing them delighted me. It slowly dawned on me that six years had passed since I'd so much as e-mailed any of my friends in Haarlem. There was consternation aplenty in what passes for my soul. How could I have been such a negligent schmuck to allow so much time to pass?

I quickly fired off a comment on Inge's Fb post, vowing to come see everyone in 2017, when I knew we'd be coming across the pond for the triennial hop festival in Poperinge. Inge replied affirmatively, and asked me to message her privately.

This is how I learned that Bill had died suddenly five months earlier, in January of 2016. Four months later, my beercycling co-conspirator Kevin was gone, too. It was obvious that our long-overdue return to Haarlem in 2017 was going to be both therapeutic and elegiac. 

And so it was.

On September 20, 2017 mother and daughter arrived by bicycle to Haarlem's Grote Markt, the market square lying outside the doors of the pleasingly esoteric Hotel Amadeus. Diana and I were waiting.

It was a letter-perfect autumn day, and so we had an outdoor drink across the way at the Grand Cafe Brinkmann, where it soon became obvious that Marilyn is a dynamo. She'd been raised speaking Dutch with Inge and English with Bill.

Afterwards came a short walk to the Jopenkerk, Jopen's long gestating brewery-in-a-church, which had been little more than a fenced-in construction zone in 2008. Now the Jopenkerk and the public space around it are people magnets.

Time slipped past. For dinner, we adjourned to Taste of India and a delicious spread of madras and curry. Dewi was in town, but he'd joined Boris at the Cafe Briljant for a tasting of rare Scotches from Rob's cellar stock. We'd see the three of them soon enough.

The lost years melted away, and it was wonderful to reconnect.

Next: Haarlem is awesome. How did I forget this fact for so many years? Next time I threaten to open a brewery, will you be a pal and sedate me, okay?

ON THE AVENUES: I'd like nothing more than to go for another ride.

ON THE AVENUES: I'd like nothing more than to go for another ride.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

It’s almost October 23, and a whole year since Kevin Richards died.

I’d like to say my period of mourning is over, but this wouldn’t be entirely honest, as I’m not sure it ever began.

That’s because in a great many ways, I’ve simply refused to acknowledge Kevin is gone forever.

Flown down to Dallas for bar-hopping and a Cowboys game?

Gotten into one of those busy times at the shop?

Slipped out to go for a century before supper?

That explains it. He’ll be back soon, standing in the very same reserved spot by the bar. We’ll have a beer (or five) and share all the stories, and the world will make sense again.

Of course, I know it isn’t to be, although one thing is perfectly clear: While I have no issues whatever with the fine people up the hill at Silvercrest, I’m spooked, and in no hurry to visit the facility any time soon.

When Kevin was diagnosed with terminal cancer last August, he spent his final weeks under hospice care at Silvercrest. Four months later, so did my mother. I’m reasonably sure she was in the same room that Kevin had been, or perhaps the one adjacent to it.

Silvercrest’s staff members were universally kind and compassionate, but the convergence was a bit much. No more, please, at least for a while.

Regular readers know that Diana and I recently traveled to Europe, spending the bulk of our time in Poperinge, Belgium and Haarlem, Netherlands.

Kevin was a big fan of both these places, and when we returned to them a month ago, each bicyclist I saw pedaling past – there were hundreds in all – reminded me of the epic beercycling times we had.

It will surprise absolutely no one to learn that our acquaintance began in the late 1980s over beer, not bicycles. Kevin started patronizing Scoreboard Liquors, the package store where I worked, and after a brief lull (I believe he moved away for a short time) we met again when the Public House came into existence in 1992.

To say that Kevin was a fixture there is to be guilty of criminal understatement, and it bears repeating, now and always: If the pub had its own Mt. Rushmore, Kevin would be one of the four faces.

Beer obviously was a shared theme of our friendship in the early years, and then a bit later, bicycles. Kevin often rode motorcycles, although I’ll always contend that human-powered transport was a better match for his innate, personalized zen. Going for bicycle rides -- and refueling afterward -- suited him well.

I helped get Kevin into better beer. He definitely helped get me into a bike saddle.

A group of pub-going cyclists gradually came together, and one late summer's day in 1999, Kevin and I rode to the top of the Knobs via Corydon Pike's switchback grade. We stopped to sag at Polly’s Freeze, the venerable ice cream haven.

An earnest discussion began. Might we venture a biking trip to Europe?

And -- heaven forbid -- have a few fine ales in the process?

The planning began. We booked hotels at three beer-oriented urban venues in Belgium, along with rental bikes for day trips radiating from each stop. Faxes (!) and e-mails were sent, and the itinerary came into shape. As the calendar turned to June, 2000, there were five of us ready to make the journey, and it proved to be a classic.

A beercycling group was born, and as many as 15 of us took part in a total of seven trips in nine years, with the last occurring in 2008. Kevin was along for four of the seven, and without his guidance, I'd have lacked the confidence to "lead" the other ones, although in fact all of these trips were genuine group efforts.

Kevin and I conceived, orchestrated and performed those beercycling trips together, and while the cast revolved, each time out we functioned as a band of brothers (and on a couple of occasions, sisters).

I’m not exaggerating when I say that Kevin’s bicycling advocacy changed my life. My European travel instincts were joyfully reborn. During previous journeys to the continent, I'd dodged bicyclists while walking between train stations, never stopping to consider how much fun it might be to ride myself.

Correction: Actually, never stopping to consider that I could do it. Kevin patiently tutored me about the art of the possible on two wheels, with or without panniers. It wouldn’t have been possible without him.

By 2003, I was able to take my bike apart, pack it in a hard shell case, reassemble it, ride it all the way from Frankfurt to Vienna (meeting friends along the way), and get the bike and me back home without incident after a month on the road.

As a humanities major with almost no technical aptitude, I've never been more proud of myself, and eternally grateful to Kevin for showing me how.

Our partnership was mutually reinforcing. We’d pause by a river, and I’d prattle on about a Jacobite revolt in a neighboring town. Then Kevin would explain the hydraulics of the locks and dam we were observing. I’d score a brewery visit, and he’d calmly repair a spoke. Kevin had his life, and I had mine. Not all our interests intersected. When they did, life was great fun.

I’ll ride again in Europe some day, even if it’s two miles on flat ground with a rental bike.

It won’t be the same. It can't.

Back in the spring of 2016, Kevin was as hale and hearty as ever. It wasn’t for nothing that people called him Moose. I ran into him one day at the pub. He was in his usual nook spot, hale and hearty, with a pint in his hand. He began prodding me in his mischievous but always purposeful manner.

Had I been riding?

Was I going to start?

Really?

Walking?

What was my problem, anyway?

Kevin notched it up. We needed to get the band together again, and start planning a trip. It might be a simple reunion, or perhaps even a bang-up finale, but we needed to do it soon, before we got too old.

The chat lasted an hour, and I emerged buzzed and enthused. Later I told Diana it was inevitable. There'd be another ride somewhere in Europe in 2017.

Alas, the cosmos had a different sort of journey planned for Kevin, and we made the trip without him, and also without the bikes. Several toasts were made, one with a providential bottle of Westvleteren 12, using the immortal beercycling mantra of Bob Reed.

Here’s to us.
May we never quarrel or fuss.
But if by chance we should disagree,
Fuck you – and here’s to me.

Here’s to Kevin. I miss him.

A lot.

---

Recent columns:

October 12: ON THE AVENUES: The Orange Occupation is here again, and as a precaution, we’ve baked a handy file into this cake.

October 5: ON THE AVENUES REVISITED: Chocolate covered frozen banana republic, or "understanding" Harvest Homecoming, our peculiar institution.

September 28: ON THE AVENUES: Sniffles, gratitude and mental exhaustion. Apparently vacation is over.

September 21: ON THE AVENUES with THE BEER BEAT: Getting in tune with the straight and narrow.