Of Bicycles and Fishes

I need to preface this tale with a social history lesson.  I suppose most young women in this so-called post-feminist age don’t remember, couldn’t place, or perhaps even wouldn’t understand the famous quote concerning gender relationships made by the writer and feminist critic Gloria Steinem, but those of us who came of age in the late 60’s know that it was she who quipped “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” 

My wife’s college days coincided with the heyday of feminism, and she was steeped in writers like Gloria Steinem, Susan Brownmiller and Andrea Dworkin.  She was still conventional enough to agree to marry me, thank God (and in a Catholic church, no less); and though I’m pretty sure Steinem wouldn’t have cared one way or the other about that, Dworkin and Brownmiller certainly seemed to have an issue with inter-gender relationships, with marriage – and its patriarchal underpinnings – being one of their favorite targets.  However, their influence on her apparently only carried so far, since she actually showed up at the church on that beautiful June day, dressed in a wedding gown that took my breath away, then took my hand in front of Fr. Thomas P. Ivory and all our guests, and hasn’t let me go yet. 

Anyway, the reason I told you that story was to tell you this one.  The other day we were expecting company for dinner.  I had done the grocery shopping and prepared a farro salad over which I planned to serve some sockeye salmon and roasted asparagus.  After getting this all organized so as to minimize what would need to be done once our guests arrived, I started in to tidy up the house, dust the furniture and generally get things ready for the evening.  I cleaned the downstairs bathroom and was vacuuming the kitchen, living room and dining room while my wife reclined on our sofa with her laptop computer, catching up on several work-related projects.  As I ran the vacuum under the sofa, I shouted to her over the din: “Boy, I bet you this is quite the Gloria Steinem dream for you, isn’t it?”  She looked up and laughed, and after she had thought for a moment, shouted back to me “Well, I hope you know that I’ll always be your fish if you’ll always be my bicycle!”

In June of 2015 we will have been married for forty years.   I have this lovely image of a Dr. Seuss-like cartoon of a fish, in a fishbowl, perched upon a bicycle seat and riding pell-mell down a country road, the water in the bowl sloshing left and right as the bike careens along, but ultimately coming to rest, safe and sound, in the hands of some friendly Seussian creature.  I’m sure my wife, while she was in college, never thought she’d ever need or even want a bicycle; but here I am, supporting her as she rides through life, helping her to get safely to wherever this journey of ours takes her; eternally grateful that this one particular fish thought that riding a bicycle might just be a good idea.