The Cycle of Life

By Dan Barber

Everybody knows that once you’ve learned to ride a bicycle you never forget, but that can be a dangerous thing, especially for an old man with a 20-year old mind set.

A few years back the United States Navy thought that it would be a good thing to send me back to school a couple of years before I turned 50. This wasn’t a standard military school it was at the University of Oklahoma. Several people were picked each year from all branches of the military and other selected government agencies like the IRS, NASA and the CIA to attend and study communications theory. Each class of students numbered about 20 people.

While at the university we all were required to live in student housing. Two students were assigned to each two bedroom, two-bath apartment. The apartment complex was located in Norman, Oklahoma adjacent to the campus and the Sooners baseball practice fields. Each of us was lent a bicycle to use during our 3-month stay and a bus pass so we could access all facilities on the campus, and in the near by town of Norman. Some of my fellow students had cars I was one of the students who opted not to bring mine. The entire area of Norman and the university is mostly geographically flat so I used the bicycle for my transportation around the campus and into town.

I became more physically fit than I had been in many years. I used my bike to go to class, to go to the movies in town, the library and just for the fun of riding around the campus and in town. Some of my classmates were younger military guys who thought they were already physically and mentally fit so their pastime was to visit a local bar to work on their class assignments, drink beer and watch “South Park.”  I never enjoyed sitting in a bar, for me it was very boring and I out grew watching cartoons when I started Junior High School. I also knew that it wasn’t possible for me to grasp the complexities of communications theories while setting in a bar sipping on a beer in front of a TV with the channel tuned to cartoons.

During that time I was an old man who was being re-energized physically, spiritually and mentally in the world of youth. My atrophied muscles were growing stronger from use. My brain was actually growing new ideas that hadn’t seen the light of new knowledge in years, but this is where my analogy of bike riding and being old with a youthful mind set comes crashing together.

My roommate was a Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant who worked in the Commandant of the Marine Corps office. He was always running where ever he went. Marines are like that because I think it is a requirement that they run so many miles each day. I tried running with my roommate, but I almost died before I got out of our apartment complex. I even went to the gym with him once, but was too embarrassed to try to lift any kind of weight. But on a bicycle I allowed myself to be transported back in time. I must have looked the site, an old grey haired man peddling around the school like a damned fool, but I didn’t care.

It was a beautiful warm day with the campus full of young people as I was headed back to my apartment on my bike with an arm load of books and a curb in front of me… I remember being able jump over just such a curb many times before…when I was a kid!

Communications theory sometimes has to leap over decades before an old man can understand that just because he could jump a curb on a bicycle as a child doesn’t mean he can still do it.