And I thought *I* was the grumpy old man

So, I'm riding my bike this afternoon. It was a freakishly warm Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and I felt I had to take advantage, despite the fact that I have an awful lot of work to get done (and still do). I was riding, exploring, enjoying the sun, and testing out my new headphones, which are the bone-conduction kind, so they don't block out ambient noise. This is perfect for bike riding in traffic, but it doesn't work quite as well as a safety feature when you like the song so much that you crank the volume way up. This detail is important to the following story, I assure you.

I was riding on a 9-foot-wide path alongside NE 108th Street near my home. This roadway and path are new, and it was my first time exploring this section. Now, I must confess that there is an on-street bike lane on this street, but to my credit, the path here is WIDE. The kind of wide that says, "we expect both pedestrians and bicyclists to use this path." I know that the law expects me to use the street for cycling rather than the sidewalk, but that's when the sidewalk is one walker wide. This path is almost 5 walkers wide. If I have the choice between dancing in the road with the cars and taking a side path that appears designed to accommodate cyclists, I'll take the path. And I was.

Not many people were out (it's January, remember?). I saw an older gentleman with a medium-sized dog coming toward me, and we both gave each other plenty of room as we passed. However, he said something to me as I passed, which appeared to be more than a standard pleasantry. With my headphones up, however, I couldn't hear him. You have to understand that I always try to expect good things from people, so when I stopped, apologized for not hearing him, and asked him to repeat himself, I was shocked at what I heard: from about 15 feet away, he hollered, "Why don't you get in the bike lane where you belong?"

I surprised even myself that my response was so civil: "Why so uncharitable? The path is perfectly wide."

He turned around and continued on his way without another word. I briefly considered yelling something more at him as my mind raced to process what had just happened. The things I considered adding ranged from angry to correctively informative to profane. There's a part of me that desperately wanted to put him in his place, but I feel good that there was a bigger part of me that decided to stay quiet. If I had to guess, his indignation stemmed from the fact that his dog jumped toward me and he blamed me for his dog's lack of control. I'll never know for sure.

Literally the next thing that came on my headphones was Lee Dorsey's "Everything I Do Gohn Be Funky (From Now On)", with lyrics that I always mishear as: "Minor hangups, minor times, but deep inside I'm free." Thanks for reading this far. I just needed to get the encounter off my chest before I could truly be free of it, though I do have to ask one question of my urban-cyclist friends: was I in the wrong? Am I required to use the on-street bike lane when the off-street path appears to have been designed to accommodate cyclists as well?

Anyway, I can't let one grumpy old man get to me. Unless that grumpy old man is me. Let's go ride.