Could you have taken your bike today?

Today being Thursday, I've had the entire day off of work. I celebrated by knocking out some chores around the house, reading a bit of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and going for a long bike ride to visit a craft store, return some library books, and so on. I popped a wire basket onto my mountain bike's front to facilitate the errands -- no easy feat, since it had to jockey for position with no fewer competitors than a bell, a headlamp, an odometer and a walrus.

Sometimes I wonder if people are starting to recognize me on the roadways. My car has a trip odometer, which I recently reset to compete with the bike odometer. Right now the car's reads 180, while the bike's hit 320 after the day's adventures. (Yes, in miles.) I spend a lot of time on that bike, going to work, going on some errand or other. I thought I might mostly attribute this effort to the obscene and ever-rising cost of gas, coupled with a thorough enjoyment of biking as a means of exercise. In other words, the motivations are all-around selfish, which might be why I don't mind so much when drivers obscure the sidewalk for minutes at a time while trying to pull out of parking lots: after all, how could I get mad at them when I'm only out here having my path blocked because I'm cheap and would like to buy skinnier jeans?

Or there may be more to it than that. This morning I dug out some white letters I'd bought months ago and arranged them over the back of a black tank top to read, "Could you have taken your bike today?" I had the idea off a billboard that caught my eye in Chicago, I'm sure while I was stuck in traffic, that read, "Could you have taken the MTA today?" or something to that effect, encouraging the use of their public rail system. A few minutes work with iron and ironing board later, I was my own bumper sticker, political cartoon, or whatever you like. And I was off.

For the first few minutes of my ride I was miserable. Enough people shout, wave, or honk their horns at me on a regular basis that I know folks look at me when I'm on my bike. Nobody honked or shouted today. I wondered if the letters were big enough that they could read. I wondered if they thought me an arrogant hippie bitch.

I relaxed after a bit and settled into my rhythm. (Hard not to, when you're on a bike.) I've lost four pounds and hardly used my car at all in the last three weeks -- and in the mean time I've wondered what a difference it would make if more people in my corner of Florida biked regularly to wherever they had to be next. Maybe city officials would bother to make certain corners safer for bicyclers and pedestrians. Bike lanes for everyone! Maybe on any given day you could ask someone the weather and they'd know, because they'd actually been outside and noticed that day. Goodness gracious, maybe we'd all have a bit less of an excuse to send pollutants into the air.

For now, my new shirt and I are just playing the same strategy as Christian discipleship, albeit for vastly different stakes: because people won't know another life is possible, unless you show it to them. And maybe even do some hinting, and where a stupid slogan on your shirt in the process.