Monday Blues (Late): Powder Blue Cannondale, and Seamus Heaney...

After a day at the Los Angeles County Fair (Dog, that place is more exhausting than a 75 mile ride), and the fact that sorting through photos of the Fortune 700 race was very time consuming, I just felt too lazy to get this out in a more timely manner. So Monday Blues on Tuesday this week: 

a claremont cyclist rides along Second Street @ Harvard Avenue in the late morning sun

It is a two-parter, and the blue Cannondale has absolutely nothing to do with remembering the life and words of Irish Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney, who passed away over the weekend. Mr. Heaney's most well-known poem involving a bicycle may be "A Constable Calls":

His bicycle stood at the window-sill,

The rubber cowl of a mud-splasher

Skirting the front mudguard,

Its fat black handlegrips

Heating in sunlight, the "spud"

Of the dynamo gleaming and cocked back,

The pedal treads hanging relieved

Of the boot of the law.

His cap was upside down

On the floor, next his chair.

The line of its pressure ran like a bevel

In his slightly sweating hair.

He had unstrapped

The heavy ledger, and my father

Was making tillage returns

In acres, roods, and perches.

Arithmetic and fear.

I sat staring at the polished holster

With its buttoned flap, the braid cord

Looped into the revolver butt.

"Any other root crops?

Mangolds? Marrowstems? Anything like that?"

"No." But was there not a line

Of turnips where the seed ran out

In the potato field? I assumed

Small guilts and sat

Imagining the black hole in the barracks.

He stoop up, shifted the baton-case

Further round on his belt,

Closed the doomsday book,

Fitted his cap back with two hands,

And looked at me as he said goodbye.

A shadow bobbed in the window.

He was snapping the carrier spring

Over the ledger. His boot pushed off

And the bicycle ticked, ticked, ticked.

Blue: A color, a mood or emotion, a genre of music. Tune in each Monday for another installment of the Blues, with a cycling twist.