My Gulay!

(This is where I go for my afternoon walks)



I think I’m running out of luck. I was punched on the head by a drunk and now someone stole my mountain bike. There’s something wrong with my fortune lately. Maybe, its time I think about murder.

I don’t know how someone could steal my bike. I was in the internet café greeting my nephew Jared happy birthday and when I came out of the café it was gone. That bike was my only means of cheap transportation. I hope the person who stole my bike reads this blog and I hope that person will realize that he didn’t just stole a bike, he stole something priceless.

I’ve always wanted to have a bike.

In fact when I was young I envied my cousin the Galvez children and their cousins the Calderon children because they had bikes. (I remember the Calderon’s only girl Chayay. She’s always fighting with her three brothers, always crying everytime I saw her…) In order for me to ride a bike, my best friend Dude and I will convince them to go the unfinished part of Greenland Subdivision to race their bikes. Of course we’ll get our turn and have fun too. They are good children for they shared their bikes with me and my best friend Dude.

The Calderon and the Galvez’s children with me and my kumpareng Dude pedaling ourselves to death, laughing, sometimes crying, sometimes bloodied and crying because of the crashes; we had no protective gears just our dirty clothes, sweaty and soiled, sometimes bloodied too.

I’ve always wanted a bike.

For almost five years now I was without a job and up to now I'm still umemployed. Four years ago my friend hired me as a timekeeper for a construction project. Out of that job I was able to buy my bike. It was a second hand, fifteen speed mountain bike. I bought that bike from my kumpare and from then on I established a special relationship with that bike. I used it bring and fetch my daughter to and from school, to buy medicine, to buy viand, etc. But there is one thing that that bike and I only knew and shared--the joy of biking in the rain.

Biking in the rain is an unexplainable experience. The water splashing on my face, the wind, the rainbows, the birds, the thunder storm…I once tried biking in the middle of the storm and… my gulay…the freedom I felt was comparable to flying an open cockpit plane (one of my dreams is to ride an open cockpit plane)…the wind was blowing behind my back, so, I had no need to pedal. It was like sailing except my body was the sail.

I don’t know how many kilometers that bike and I had traveled and….

I miss my bike.