Grip

When I built up my Long Haul Trucker, I did some homework on pedals and found some that claimed to be the biggest, grippiest platform for someone like me who prefers to ride unattached. They're good pedals, and they're far from wore out, so I'd have been riding them for a long time to come.

But Corinna managed to wear the bearings out on the pedals for one of her bikes, and the pedals she got to replace them had me green with envy. Even bigger, with spikes that grip your shoes or boots. I wanted me some of them pedals.

For my birthday, she kept saying she'd been to the Linotype store to find me some lead type from the old days. Which sounds plausible enough given that I'm a graphic designer, but she said she'd been to two Linotype stores looking for just the right thing and hadn't found it. Besides the fact that she pronounced it 'li-nə-ˌtīp' instead of 'lī-nə-ˌtīp' I couldn't figure out how a company that is long out of business had more than one retail outlet in the Kansas City metro area. What kind of antique malls was she shopping at?

Kind of like the 'nose hair trimmers' that turned out to be my Brooks saddle, what she'd actually gone and done was get me some huge, grippy platform pedals like the ones I'd been coveting on her bike.

Now all I have to do is get healed up enough to ride again.