Gosh! I forgot to talk about my “I’m-trying-to-relate-it-to-the-blackout injury.” (Is that more or less glamorous than calling it by its other name: “Cynthia’s First Bicycling Injury”?)

A half a chicken breast. ½ a bag of frozen scallops. An unopened pint of Egg Beaters. The insulated lunchbox I put it all into. Oh, and a little sweater, just in case Mommie’s AC was on full blast. That’s what was in the basket on my handlebars. I’ve owned this bike for almost three years, and this was the first time I had attached the basket and toted stuff around. I had been gaining confidence on my bicycle. Balance always felt steady, I could find a pace—albeit a slow one—and keep it up. Who knew such a tiny change would throw me off? As I coasted down 51st Street, I could feel the weight difference and so I went even slower than usual … hell, as slow as I ride, I could have been traveling backwards in time. And I was close to a dead stop at 12th Avenue and 51st Street when I realized that the red light was not going to change soon enough, so I went to put my right foot down. I think the extra weight in the basket shifted the front wheel further than I anticipated. Just like Arte Johnson on his tricycle on Laugh-In, bicycle and I just keeled over. An older man stopped his bike and asked if I was okay. It must have looked to him like I fainted. Why else would anyone just topple over sideways like that? It looked to me like I had just skinned my knee. I thanked him for his concern, and as he rode away, I poured some water on my boo-boo, blotted some of the blood, and decided to continue uptown.

Here’s how it relates to the blackout:
1. If there had not been a blackout, I would have been at work at 11:30am on Friday, not biking up to my mother’s house.
2. If there had not been a blackout, I would not have had food that needed to be cooked before it spoiled in the never-used-before-basket of my bicycle.

Post-script to this is that maybe I should have considered that a fall bad enough to take off a square inch of skin was bad enough to bruise the underlying bone. Came home from the Greenmarket on Saturday limping slightly, knee a little swollen and achy. I took a nap. I had a cup of coffee. I even got dressed to go to Grand Central and take the train up to Putnam County to visit Ellen and Bryce. But in the end, I had to admit defeat and stay home with an ice pack on my knee.