The Old Man And His Bike

 

     Yesterday morning, I went to my younger sister’s office at around nine in the morning. I parked my bike at the edge of the sidewalk right in front of the building’s main door near a parked car (which is my usual spot whenever I go there; there’s no bike rack) and asked a guard for my sister.  Then I pulled a chair (there were monoblocs in front of the building intended for clients who’d have to fall in line before they could enter) and sat beside my bike.

     I probably was waiting for around ten minutes when a man who looked in his late sixties arrived and parked his bike really close to mine (I didn’t mind). I observed him and it was obvious that he was impoverished (shirt with holes, faded jeans, rubber slippers begging to be replaced). He started to lock his bike’s frame to its front wheel with a rusty chain (definitely not one you would use as a bike lock as it’s huge and if it’d become a little bigger, it’d be fit to tie a ship). Anyway, he probably couldn’t afford to buy a lock, and helmet, too. His bike also looked old and worn-out and rusty and frankly, if he’d offer to sell it to me for five hundred pesos, I’d flatly reject it and just give him the five hundred (If I could afford it). And I didn’t think someone would bother to steal it. But he was locking it like it was the most expensive thing in the world.

     But right after he finished locking the bike, a guard approached him and told him that he couldn’t park his bike there as he would be obstructing the flow of people in the sidewalk, to this I disagreed. I wouldn’t put my bike there if it would be obstructing people. But the guard insisted that the old man should take his bike away and park it somewhere else—to which the old man grudgingly obeyed.

     But the guard didn’t say anything about my bike.

     I looked around and realized that there were bikes parked away from the main door of the building but whose owners had some transactions with the bank—so my usual parking spot was really off-limits to bicycles?

     I became uncomfortable but was hesitant to move my bike (I didn’t have my lock key with me). A guard (there were three or four of them) then approached me and asked, “Sir, bumaba na si ma’am?”

     I answered “hindi pa” and he told me he’d call her up again but it was then that I saw my sister going out of the building. As I was about to leave after my chit-chat with her, I saw the old man, now looking more harassed, coming out of the building. I watched him unlock his ship anchor chain, er, bike chain and leave, and in spite of my own perpetual heartaches, I felt sad for him.

     And I, too, started pedaling, vacillating a bit on whether to take a side trip to nearby Intramuros or buy hopia from so-much nearer Eng Bee Tin and then go straight home.

     Hopia won.

     Hopia always wins.