Annie Was Amazing

Sunday I got on the bike for the first time and rode, on another of the beautiful spring days we have pretty consistently been having, up to the GW Bridge, then back down to 102nd and then back to the apartment. The Hudson River bike path was closed off at 125th, so I had to head inland and ride up Broadway to 116th before swinging back over to Riverside. It's a stretch on Broadway that before the illness I could do in the highest of the 21 gears on the bike, but this time I had to downshift twice and still struggled with the mild, but blocks-long incline. By the time I finished and hung the bike back up I'd probably gone 7 or 8 miles and was completely trashed, as tired and overdone as the first weekend after getting out of rehab when my son and I walked back to the apartment from Absolute Bagels on a Sunday morning after a Saturday night snowstorm. There was nothing to do but flop on the couch and watch the Masters for an hour or so. All I could do while watching Phil Mickelson hold everybody off was think about Annie and her biking to Grimaldi's in Brooklyn in our group. More than twice the distance I did, on a similarly gorgeous April day, must have been almost exactly three years ago, scarcely three months before her death. How hard must that have been? How determined, brave, she had to have been to tough it out and do it.