MAKE: 1969 Girl’s Schwinn Hollywood, black, with original paint
COST: $75
PURCHASE LOCATION: 75th and 13th, Ballard, Seattle
ACCESSORIES: Silver basket, streamers
NAME: Sylvia after Sylvia Plath
MOOD WHEN RIDING: Glee, Pure happiness
- Sylvia was a bicycle I had when I was in graduate school.
I saw it in a field of bicycles, actually a front lawn of
bicycles. It was a July evening, still warm, around 6 p.m. I
had a sack of groceries, was a bit hungry for dinner and
just walking along. I was broke and living on food stamps
so I begged the man, who was selling the bikes, to not
sell this one. I can get the money, I said. I’ll be back in an
hour. I went home and called my brother. I never borrow
from my family, so that says something. I went back and
wrote the man a check. - I have never fallen so completely in love with a thing. Like
she breathed. Like I could imagine myself on her in just a
matter of time. I was forty-seven. I had fallen apart while
trying to get my MFA in Boulder, Colorado five years
before. Had moved back to Seattle, couch-surfed for a
year and half, and then been put in a group home by my
family because I was depressed, and they didn’t know what
else to do with me. I needed that bicycle because,
although I didn’t know it, I was desperate for joy, a way to
quickly access it, by riding. - I rode Sylvia all over Ballard. I rode her to and from the
pool. I rode her for no reason, for any reason. I spent an
entire summer on Sylvia. People smiled at me as I rode. It
could have been because I was smiling. - People often associate Sylvia Plath with her death—with
her suicide. She killed herself, they say. I say the illness
of depression killed her. Before that, she must have
enjoyed her life. At times. When she wrote something
especially good. Maybe when she rode a bicycle while she
was a student at Smith or later at Cambridge. When she
talked to a friend. Fell in love. Had her children. Made
muffins. On June 20, 1958, she wrote in her journal: It is
as if my life were magically run by two electric currents:
joyous positive and despairing negative–whichever
is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.
I named my bicycle Sylvia to honor the currents she lived
with, to honor her life. - I gave Sylvia away. My last year of school, I had to move
into an apartment with a lot of steep stairs. Sylvia, for all
her one-speed glory, was heavy. I gave Sylvia back to
the bicycle man from whom I had purchased her. It was
wrong but I actually traded her in for a lighter model, a
10-speed from the 1990s. An ugly 10-speed I never had a
name for and rarely rode. I traded Sylvia back in one of
the ill-conceived decisions of my life. I should have fought
for Sylvia, for the joy she gave me, for those moments
when, while riding her, I forgot everything else. - I once loved a bicycle named Sylvia.
