I couldn't agree more about the "best" being subjective like love partners, painting, music and good food. The last ten days that I spent in New York City taught me that exactly. I stayed in my mother's two bedroom coop apartment on Riverside Drive. I slept three to a room ( my wife, my son and myself all sprawled out bowery flop house style on a combination of bed, inflatable bed and convertible mattress). This old pre war brick high rise has a paint peeling problem in many of the corner rooms causing a constant pelting of small flakes of paint to decorate the floor or your nose. The kitchen and bathrooms haven't been substantially upgraded since they were built 90 years ago, but the memories kept rushing back because this is the apartment building (apartment 13A as opposed to 9C) I was born in more than a half century ago. Even though there is no internet access, no marble kitchen counter top, no Italian faucet fixture in the bathrooms, I am instantly in love again with New York City living. Manhattan has become so gentrified that a survivor of the bad old years of the seventies is in somewhat of a culture shock. I would be hard pressed to find anyone in Manhattan willing to stab me or hold me up at gunpoint or beat me up gang fist method (I experienced all these things growing up). Still something of an old love affair with NYC has been rekindled. I had sent one of my bikes up to New York from my home in Miami. It was waiting for me, still boxed up in the building's newly modernized individual storage rooms. I reassembled the bike using an allen wrench and some vaseline for the seatpost, stem and pedals (this was the only grease readily available in an 87 year old mother's house - She has very little need for Phill Woods green grease). I wiped the 3Rensho down and was amazed at how insensitive I was, once believing that this bike should have been repainted and had all it's long point lugs filed down to look like a prettier version of Yoshi Kono's and not a rush job bike his shop often turned out during the 80's. After having spent an afternoon looking at Gabriel Romeu's hundred or so bikes in New Jersey, I see the wisdom in accepting a certain well used and well loved aesthetic to all things (He understands this well).
Now off to the bike loop in Central Park .... It's 6.2 miles of lovely challenging, snakey, rolling hills that weave through the collective lifestyles of young and old who walk hand in hand, make love behind the bushes and on the benches, grow into and out of adolescence, grow old and limp, grow fat and porky, loose weight and become reborn jogging and bike riding. They throw frisbees, walk dogs, find nature, find themselves and each other. The park loop is closed every morning until 8 AM so it attracts literally scores of heavy duty and not so heavy duty riders (less than 5 percent classical old steel which is the probably the same percentage of true intellectuals and true art lovers who populate the earth). The ride from 84th street and Riverside Drive to 72nd and Central Park West can be accomplished in less than five minutes at pre rush hour early morning traffic conditions. In fact, on the weekends at that same hour, it can be accomplished even faster, and without ever unclipping, or even seeing more than one or two moving motor vehicles on the street. After a day or two red lights have no particular meaning and are only there to factor into the equation of how and when to cross intersections, but once you're into the park you are free. You're free to fall in love again with one of the finest cities ever to evolve, to fall in love with your own quick beating heart and to fall in love with the subjective nature of excellence in old machinery. When I put the old 3Rensho away in the storage locker I had to turn the front wheel slightly to make it fit before I locked it. I felt a twinge of pain knowing I wouldn't be seeing her for maybe another year and this was no way to treat a lover, but the only other possibility was locked up on one of the thirty or so pro bike store type racks thoughtfully provided for tenants in the big bike room. I couldn't put her there next to the many rusting and abused and unused bikes. There she would have had to converse with an old Peugeot or a Rudge and they would have told her that she's sweet, shiny and sassy now, but in a few years her master would not return and only leave her there to have her tires rot and to collect dust like so many of the others. I would rather she be alone in dark isolation that be subjected to that negative defeatist talk from throngs of neglected machinery. I will again return to my 3Rensho, ready to to take off where we left off.
Garth Libre in Miami Fl. USA