I live in an old Levitt-built neighborhood, where the first houses were built and sold some time around 1966 or so. My house, an L-shaped one-level ranch house, was built in 1969. Our neighborhood was “in transition,” as the real estate lady put it, when we bought the house in 2005. “Transition” was, I think, real estate-speak for “becoming less than 100 percent white.”
Actually, that transition had begun a few years earlier. When this development was first built, I imagine that it was all white or nearly so. Silver Spring was still at that time a desirable, close-in suburb of Washington, DC. It’s still a close-in suburb because Washington, DC didn’t move or anything. But Silver Spring is much more diverse, much more urban, much more densely populated than its counterparts on the western side of the county. We still have lots of green spaces and old growth trees that form shady canopies, but there are also many apartment complexes and townhouse developments here. Hewitt Avenue and Bel Pre Road are divided at intervals by bus stop crosswalks for the many residents who take public transportation between their jobs and their apartments. Spanish is almost as common as English. It’s crowded, sometimes loud, and occasionally chaotic. I love it here.
Another transition was also underway in 2005; the transition from old to young. I was still young in 2005, at least by today’s definition. I was 39 when we bought this house (I would turn 40 later in the year) and my children were very young. My older son was not quite four when we moved in here, and my younger son was eight months old (making the one-level design of the house ideal for us). Now, we’re not quite old yet, but we’re closer to old than young. Our kids are almost grown. We’re not ready to retire yet but we talk about it. Maybe we’ll move somewhere, depending on where our kids end up. Maybe we’ll stay put (the one-level design is also ideal for retired people).
In the 17 years that we have been here, many of our older neighbors have moved away, to small condos or retirement communities or assisted living facilities. Some have died. Some are still here. We even still have some original owners living in the houses they bought brand-new and raised their families in.
*****
This didn’t start as an essay about my classic mid-century suburban neighborhood. It started with me seeing something and wanting to write about it. The thing that I saw–and am still seeing–is an older lady, who is probably really just an old lady, riding a tricycle.
It’s a large adult-sized tricycle, a thing that I knew existed but had never actually seen in action before. Thankfully, I’m usually swimming laps in the pool when the lady rides her tricycle around the pool parking lot, because she looks a little silly and I always want to laugh when I see her. She doesn’t look as silly as the people riding Segways around the Mall downtown, though. I literally laugh aloud whenever I see someone riding one of those things. That said, they also look like a lot of fun and I’d totally ride one if I had the opportunity. But only with others. If I’m going to do something utterly ridiculous, then I’m taking my family and friends down with me.
The lady is neither eccentric-looking, nor stereotypically “old-lady” looking, whatever that means. She’s probably in her mid to late 70s, with short, stylish unnaturally bright red hair. I think the extreme color is intentional. I don’t think she’s trying to fool us into believing that her hair never turned gray, like my grandmother, who refused to admit to coloring her hair until the day she died, at age 98–no one was fooled, Nana. I think she just likes punkish, artistic hair color. She wears glasses, probably out of necessity but her frames are also distinctively stylish. I’ve never seen her anywhere other than in the parking lot on her tricycle, so I don’t know what her day-to-day wardrobe looks like, but she wears exercise clothes when she’s riding.
I assume that the tricycle riding is part of her exercise regimen but she also looks like she has a lot of fun tooling around the parking lot on that crazy giant tricycle. Why a tricycle rather than a bicycle is beyond me. It could be that she never learned to ride a bike. Or it could be that she did once know how to ride a bike but has now forgotten, popular wisdom aside. Maybe she had a stroke or suffered some injury. Or maybe she feels safer and a bit more stable on a three-wheeled cycle. Or maybe the tricycle is just more fun than a bicycle. It looks fun, I have to admit.
*****
I started writing this a few months ago; maybe mid-July. It’s October. It was hot then and it’s cold now. Well, it’s cold for me, anyway. It’s Saturday morning, 48 degrees, and my summer blood has not thickened yet. I’m not yet accustomed to the cold. Give it until April.
Anyway, since summer is gone and we’re officially into fall (not just “Labor Day is over” fall, but real, chilly, fire pit at night, leaves crunching underfoot, cable knit sweater fall) and the pool has been closed for weeks, I haven’t seen Tricycle Lady out and about. The pool parking lot remains open but that’s where the neighborhood middle school kids hang out after school. Maybe she rides her tricycle in the morning when I’m at work and all the kids are at school. I don’t know how tough she is but I can tell you that it would take a tough person to ride a giant tricycle through and around a gaggle of seventh graders. That is a tough crowd. Trust me when I tell you that they are not laughing with you. They are laughing at you.
*****
When I wrote the first few paragraphs of this, I finished with the words "inverse proportion," because I had an idea for a conclusion and I thought that I should write it down so that I would not forget. That is good thinking, right? But it didn't work. When I tried to finish, I couldn't remember what those two words were supposed to mean. But now I think I know. I think I was thinking about the advantages of getting older, chief among them being that the older you get, the less you care about what other people think of you. Desire for approval is in inverse proportion to age, from ages 10 to 90, let's say. So this lady, who is probably in her late 70s or so, is rapidly approaching the age at which she will not care at all. Laugh your heads off, middle schoolers. Tricycle Lady doesn’t care. Much like the Honey Badger of circa 2012 internet fame, Tricycle Lady doesn’t give a shit. She’s going to keep on riding.
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