Chapter Six
Meet Britta the Animal
May 1, 2009—Bay Area Visit
Day 2 at Ted and Britta’s was the first bike ride day of the trip. This is the “ride” part of the “Drive, Ride, Repeat” title.
About my biking: I’m not very fast. I ride a lot, and I can do a century ride (a group 100-mile ride), but compared with most MAMILs (Middle Aged Men in Lycra) I’m a slow poke (and yes, I realize that at 56 I’m no longer middle-aged). For my last century, my average speed was 13.9 MPH, which means I came to the finish after the beer was gone. Lena is a stronger rider than I, and if she wanted to work at it, could really kick my butt.
Speaking of middle-aged. When I was 35, Lena and I were robbed at gunpoint. The guy jumped out of the bushes, stuck a huge gun at my belly, and said “Give me your f**king wallet!” I just handed it over, and didn’t say “Actually, I don’t have a f**king wallet, but I have a regular wallet. Will that do?”
For some reason, the experience was more interesting than scary, but the scary part was yet to come. The next day the local newspaper ran a story that started with “Last night a middle-aged couple …” “Middle-aged! What? We’re not … oh, wait a second …” That was a rude awakening, and if you’ve seen the movie The Others, it was like the scene where the kids are screaming, “We’re not dead, we’re not dead!” We were yelling “We’re not middle-aged, we’re not middle-aged!”
Back to the trip, Lena took the day off, and as soon as Britta got her coffee doping infusion, she and I headed off for a 30-mile ride to Skyline Drive, on the ridge above Berkeley and Oakland. We had planned to ride up Mount Diablo (she rides up the mountain once a week, which I see as a sign of mental illness), but there was rain in the forecast so we settled for this ride instead.
Britta is an animal, and dropped me on all the hills. If you’re not a cyclist, “drop” means that by the time I got to the top, she’d read two novels and taken a nap. My consolation was that her chain fell off her $3,000 bike. Twice.
Ted and Britta have a little dog named “Sophie.” It’s some kind of Lassie Apso, or Cocka Shitzel. I’ll now draw on my vast scientific background to tell you something about dogs. Here is an actual brain of a dog:
The lightning bolt things are neuroses attempting to enter the dog’s brain. Large dogs have a “dog brain barrier” (Canis cerebrum obice) which keeps the neuroses from entering the brain. That barrier is absent in small dogs.
Here is Sophie’s main neurosis: she has a doggie door that she knows how to use, and can use without any physical assistance. However, when she wants to go out or in she won't use it until someone comes into the room and says "OK!" in a perky voice. She will pee in the house rather than go through the door without someone saying “OK!”
Her other neurosis is that she eats Britta’s underwear. So, she has that in common with Ted.