Morning Sickness

I went to an old fashioned bakery this morning before I hit Starbucks. I had forgotten how intoxicating real baked goods could smell, how air could virtually whisper "good morning." Different from the bold "wake up" message that wafts into your nostrils when the fresh aroma of Starbucks beans greets you. Not better. Just different.

Back in the day, there were no Starbucks, and we had to make do with simple pleasures. Like waiting for commercial breaks to get a snack because you couldn't just press a button and back up to see what you missed. And being blissfully unaware that someone was trying to reach you unless you happened to be home when the phone rang. And not having to report to your ninth grade social studies class that your greatest recent accomplishment had been to send over ten thousand text messages in the previous month. (It would take me ten years to achieve that. My kids make fun of me when I text because I'm so slow. It's like learning to ski; you have to do it when you're young and fearless.)

And old-fashioned bakeries. I used to love going with my mom to the one in our neighborhood, with the cases of brightly iced, perfect looking cookies, racks of freshly baked breads, and mouth watering displays of thickly iced cupcakes and fat layer cakes. I loved the smell, but most of all, I loved watching the bakery workers do their thing. The speed with which they would fold the thin white cardboard boxes would rival the texting agility of any twenty-first century teen. My favorite part was the string. The candy-striped blue and white string that hung from the ceiling, that they would grab and wind three times around the box one way, then three times the other, and tie up with a dexterity and efficiency I only wish the Starbucks barristas could replicate when the line is out the door. And then they would snap the string with their own bare hands, soundless except for the light tapping of their knuckles against the box.

Morning trips to the bakery would somehow bestow a magic upon the rest of the day. The whispered "good morning" would repeat itself in our ears as the aroma of the sinful sweets permeated the air in our kitchen. There was a kind of contentment to it all, never marred, back then, by panicked thoughts about how we might somehow jump start our metabolism and work off the newly forming fat. All we knew was when the sugar buzz wore off, we'd just go grab another bite. Or maybe think about lunch.

My trip to the bakery this morning got me so caught up in reminiscing about tranquil and carefree days I half expected my day in deep dark upper middle class suburbia to pan out like a lazy Saturday in the seventies. Silly bird. After shoveling in some chocolate coffee cake, I did what any self-respecting modern type-A person would do: I went to a spin class. When I arrived, everyone was in crisis mode. The cleaning crew had done a terrible, terrible thing when they scoured the spin studio the night before: they moved the bikes. Not just an inch here and there, but all over the room. I can only imagine the glee they experienced knowing how many lives would be destroyed in the morning.

The scene was surreal. Grown men and women in wildly colored spandex (I think there's something in the dye that makes people extra kooky) scurrying around frantically, peering at the little identification numbers under the handlebars, sticking their faces right in there even if someone was already on the bike (nobody brings their reading glasses to spin). One woman spent ten minutes searching, and when she finally located "her bike" (by then occupied), she practically wept. The person on the bike was uncharacteristically nice (or terrified), and politely dismounted. Everybody was happy. Not.

Apparently, it's not just about the bike. Location, location, location (relative to window ledges and fans and speakers). So the woman proceeded to wheel the three ton bike through the very crowded room of spinners, each one of us compulsive in our own right, but each one of us humbled (and even appalled) by the extent of this woman's lunacy. Even the other folks who had searched the room for their very special bikes now looked a little introspective -- thinking perhaps they should have lived dangerously and risked the demoralizing trauma of a lower RPM read-out.

There are two things people like the bike fanatics don't understand: (1) the calming effect of a trip to an old-fashioned bakery before spin class; and (2) the calming effect of being able to tell yourself, when your power and RPM read-outs are low, that it's not you, it's the bike, stupid.

Maybe I just don't get it. Maybe the eagle in me just doesn't understand the seriousness of the term "stationary bike."