Scary times on the bike. I received your letter Friday. Thanks. I guess you had my nice fat letter waiting for you when you got home on Wednesday. Ten pages of letters to you and not a blog post in the envelope. Yes, hopefully you can find some posts in the letter but I do understand you disappointment when there is no letter in an envelope that is addressed to you.

It is 9:20 PM and I have just finished printing out the four posts that I am enclosing. I apologize for waiting for the last minute to start your letter and as a result will send a continuation of this letter out in next day or so. The first two posts are more of a personal nature than usual so hopefully they will count as partial credit as part of a personal letter to you.

Yes I did send Mom one of my original hand made Mother's Day cards. I used a Tiffany ad from the New York Times on the cover of the card so it looked like one of those "a gift has been ordered for you" cards. I joked inside that there was no gift from Tiffany's coming so do not cut my allowance. I did go on to say that she certainly deserves a gift from Tiffany's and I wished her a happy Mother's Day. The card was mailed out on Tuesday, so I am pretty sure she got it on time.

I'm glad you had an enjoyable and improved bike ride with your fraternity brothers. Yes, we did ride bikes a lot as kids. I remember riding to Hale Avenue school many a day. And of course I was always riding over to your house, along and crossing Main Street. I continued to do a lot of bike riding in Brooklyn, and certainly there was more traffic and other dangers than in the suburbs of Long Island.

I think there is also an age/parent thing that kicks in that changes our perspective of what is safe for our children to do. Yet we had parents. Did they not care for our safety?

I certainly had some scary times on the bike yet I kept riding. I remember leaving Hale Avenue one time doing the standing up pedaling thing and making a left turn from one side of the street to the other and going flying over the handlebars as I slid out on a bunch of sand left over on the road. And all that riding was without a helmet! What were we thinking? Or not.

Life is all about a constantly expanding knowledge base. And a big part certainly is as us older types age, our mortality begins to really add yet another dimension to what we consider safe. Riding in a car without seatbelts? Other points to be blogged about.  ¶ 8:49 AM