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Now that the weather has warmed up, I’ve been getting back out on my bike again (something I was sticking to pretty well in the fall until it got too cold to ride). I came home from class last night and immediately changed and headed out for a ride since it was still kinda light out and I knew if I wasted any time inside I’d end up not going.

So I’m about 3/4 of the way around my second lap when I round a corner and see a little boy standing in the street. He was probably about 18 months old, and there wasn’t an adult anywhere in sight. I slammed on my brakes and double- and triple-checked the area to make sure there wasn’t someone working in their yard or something and the little tyke had just wandered away for a second. Not a soul around.

He ran right over to me when I stopped and got off the bike, so I dumped my bike on the sidewalk and picked him up out of the street. The house he was standing in front of had the storm door closed, but the main door was open, so I put him in the middle of the yard (I would have felt weird bringing a kid up to someone’s porch) and ran up to the house and heard a lady inside yelling for someone. I banged on the window and a slightly disheveled-looking woman poked her head around the corner. I waved for her to come out front. She sort of half-jogged down the hallway, and when she opened the door, I pointed at the kid and said, “Is he yours?”

She seemed relived to have found him, but not as outwardly demonstrative of it as I might have expected. Weird. Anyway, I hope he doesn’t get out of the house again. If I was making the same lap in my car instead of a bike, he would have been a lot harder to see. Kinda scary.

In an unrelated incident, when I got in my car this morning to come to work, the song cued up on my iPod was “This Boy Is Exhausted”. Completely fitting.