Imaginary Friends

When my first child was 3 years old, she had imaginary friends. She first used them to test the waters of parental dictates with statements like "My boy thinks that you can have dessert even though you don't eat your dinner." When I would respond that her boy was incorrect, she would hastily say that she TOLD him that but he wouldn't believe her. Jack, as he later became known, was the test case, the one who made the mistakes. He was later joined by Pee-Hee (a girl) and then THEY were joined by her five boys and five girls, with no assigned names. She just referred to them as "my five boys and my five girls." When we went out, we were quite a crowd. They all disappeared when she started kindergarten, just like the pediatrician said they would, although she did name her two goldfish Jack and Pee-Hee. Mark has been an avid online college sports board commenter. Actually, I'm not really sure what you call grown men who go to Cougar/Ute sports boards, assign themselves monikers and avatars so they can chat/argue about college sports, religion, books, cycling, news, etc. with people they have never met. *I* call them his imaginary friends. Every once in a while, mostly when he goes back to BYU for a football game, an event is planned (such as a tailgate party) where he actually meets these people. I mean, how do you know they are not mass murderers or something? So, with a big roll of my eyes, I agreed to go to Lake Tahoe this weekend to meet up with 10 other people from his board who he had never met to ride our bicycles 71 miles around the lake. We met for dinner the night before and introductions were made. I had a hard time keeping straight the real names and their posting names such as: bluegoose, bigPiney, the Borg, etc. But I have to admit, they were fun (and normal) people. There were 12 of us in all (four women, 8 men) who rode the lake, 5 of whom sported BYU cycling jerseys. In South Shore, a minivan passed us with someone hanging out of the window screaming, "Go Utes!" At one of our rest stops, three cyclists from Carson City flipped a U-turn and came back to find out who we were. One of them has a son attending BYU. It was a lovely ride around the lake, despite the thunder and rain as we climbed the switchbacks up to Emerald Bay. Traffic was pretty bad, being a Saturday in August.The most amazing thing that happened, though, occurred between the 25 and 35 mile marks. We were close to beginning the climb up Spooner grade and came upon a long line of cars being turned around and police cars blocking both sides of the road at Sand Harbor. When we got up to the policemen, they told us we were free to go through, that one side of the road was washed out from a broken pipe. It was awesome! For the next 10 miles we had the road to ourselves! After reaching the summit, there were those cyclists who hit 48 mph on the downhill. I'm a big chicken and kept it at 36. We returned to our condo for a post-ride meal and chatted for a couple of hours. It turns out that imaginary friends can be quite enjoyable.