Yesterday, I had a lively conversation with someone (Tania) regarding my latest obsession, riding my bike—in traffic. Now, this someone is among the contingent who has nagged me for years about my diet, my lack of exercises, and my fondness for white chocolate mochas from Starbucks, even threatening to tattle to my nutritionist about minor omissions in my food journal. You’d think the bike riding would be cause for celebration. I’ve lost fifty pounds, my blood pressure has dipped to normal, and I feel like a kid again, out there weaving between the Hummers and the Beemers on Peachtree.

We’d begun a discussion about the appeal of the raw, spontaneous, rough draft vs. the carefully crafted, polished poem (poetry being another interest of mine lately). Just because she has an MFA and a book published, she thinks she’s an expert. She gets riled up when I suggest that craft (distinction) might take a backseat to art (invention). “You can invent all day long,” she argued, “but without the WORK of revision, you end up with a spiral notebook full of ‘today’s thoughts,’ good for nothing more than reading at the open mic at Bobo’s Pizza.”

I know what she means. I attended just such an event recently and saw for myself what can happen when you give the general public license to write—and a microphone. It’s even worse when the sound system doesn’t work and the “artists” are drinking too many Cosmopolitans and smoking up the room with their Dunhills.

Yet, I’d have to say I’ve seen spontaneous, simple scribblings of students, written during class, that were far superior, far more moving, than some of the overly glossy, complicated poems I’ve read.

So I was on the verge of a pithy rebuttal when she noticed the flesh strawberry covering the underside of my right arm, wrist to elbow, and wanted to know how it happened. It’s a funny story, really, about not having the bike in proper gear and losing my chain and jumping the sidewalk, almost successfully, this occurring on Piedmont, one of the city’s busiest streets, around 7 p.m., one of its busiest times. She, however, failed to see the humor.

In fact, she said outright, “That’s not funny, Hank. You’re going to get yourself killed, and then I won’t have a job. I’ll have to go to work filling crullers at Krispy Kreme.” See, that’s her idea of funny. “Why don’t you ride trails instead?” she wondered at me. “Jump some rocks and logs for excitement. It’s dangerous, too, but you have more control—don’t have to worry about some guy driving an SUV with a cell phone in one hand and a frappuccino in the other.” She prefers the challenge of roots to Marta buses. Roots aren’t much of a challenge, in my opinion.

She delivered what was meant to be her closing arguments, via Frost, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” Then she sat back smugly in her chair, whereupon I appropriated Pink Floyd, twisting the meaning for my own purposes: “’Stay out of the road, if you want to grow old.’ I want to be young forever.”

“The edge defines,” I reminded her. “And what’s edgier than cruising downhill at 30mph, wedged between a Dodge Ram and the Cobb County Transit during rush hour?” I tried to convey the thrill of it, but she wasn’t convinced, so I referenced one of her favorite books, Gregory Orr’s Poetry as Survival, saying I simply have a higher threshold for disorder than she does. She still wasn’t buying. Then I appealed to her writer’s sense of perspective: “My bike affords me a completely different point of view.

“Riding in Savannah, for instance, I experienced firsthand the delineation between the haves and the have-nots, the vehemence with which the economically downtrodden will try to run you down. In New York, on the other hand, I experienced a democratic tolerance for vehicles of every type. You could ride a pogo stick in Manhattan; no one gives a shit. I was bored on my bike in New York.”

“In a strange sort of way, being in the road on my bike is a way of communicating,” I continued.

“Communicating what—that you’re an idiot?!”

I put my boss face on to remind her who she was talking to. By now, though, she was looking at me as though my brains were leaking out of my ears—like she should do something quick. And doing what the desperate do, she resorted to playing on sentimentality, which is not, incidentally, a desirable strategy for a poet. She asked me, “How would you feel if your daughter got a hankering (pun intended) to cruise up the I-285 Access Road at 5:30 p.m.?”

“My daughter’s an adult; she can do what she wants,” I responded.

She pressed, “That’s not what I asked. I know Elizabeth is a grown-up. How would you feel about it? Wouldn’t it make you crazy-worried?”

Here was the point exactly, the difference between her and me. I don’t believe we should live our lives that way—within the safety zone, by the rules, adhering to what we’d advise for our children. Our children have their own obsessions. Out of those obsessions, they will paint, or sculpt, or play music, or knit, or dance, or write, or whatever they’re driven to do. Some will ride their bikes in the street. Some will jump out of airplanes. There’s nothing we can do about it. Nothing we should. C’est la vie.

There’s a writer named Lydia Davis, whose work defies categorization. You don’t know whether some pieces are stories or poems or what. She plays with language as if she were playing a game, and by reading her work, you’re playing it with her. She’s making up the rules as she goes, too, and she wins every time. Tania takes risks with her poetry—she does. But it’s a fact she’s been writing about the same things for ten years. I think she’s gotten too comfortable. She says she wants to write short stories. Why hasn’t she? She’d have to go to a different kind of threshold, that’s why. Thresholds are scary. Like being on a ten-speed and having a Mack truck behind you.

Emily Dickinson once wrote in a letter to a childhood friend who’d grown too wise and cautious for her taste: “The shore is safer, Abiah, but I love to buffet the sea—I can count the bitter wrecks here in these pleasant waters…but oh, I love the danger!” They didn’t have traffic in the 1800’s. The sea was the best Emily could do.

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