This past fall, I was bicycling in Hadley and I came up on a dead squirrel in the road. I got off my bike and used the instep of my foot to move the remains to the edge of a field on the side of the road. Two other cyclists approached me as I was finishing relocating the squirrel and asked if I was all right, apparently thinking I might have run into the carrion and taken a fall. I told them I had stopped to remove it from the road. They seemed to assume I’d done this for the safety of other bikers, much like I might remove a large rock, thanked me for doing so, and whizzed on down the road.

It occurred to me at that moment that my habit of getting off my bike to relocate the remains of creatures killed by motor vehicles had the collateral benefit of enhancing the safety of other bikers. Up to that point, the motive I was aware of for my doing so was to enable the animal to decompose on the earth in privacy and dignity, rather than decaying on the asphalt, seen but ignored, perhaps run over again and again.

I’ve developed other habits while biking that also feel like “the next right thing,” that are “good for the soul,” if one is open to the possibility of such things.

One of my bike routes takes me past the North Hadley Cemetery. Years ago I stopped there one day to sit in the quietude and have a tall drink from my water bottle. I saw a family in the form of four gravestones, the tallest of which was around three feet tall. There was a mother, a father and two daughters. According to carvings on the stones, one of the daughters passed when she was twenty-five years old, and the other at twenty-one months. The last of the family, at least this part of it buried side by side, died in 1865.

Now I stop every time I take that bike route and visit the family. I suspect I might be the only visitor they’ve had in a century or so, in terms of people who come to the cemetery specifically to spend time with them. While I’m at the graves, I pay my respects, ponder some about their lives and mine, their time and mine, and say some words which those of you who are so inclined might call prayers. Then I get back on my bike and continue down the road.

Another routine I have while biking has nothing to do with honoring posthumous remains and everything to do with the glorious celebration of life’s little pleasures. Whenever I’m on the Canalside Rail Trail up Turners Falls way, I get off the trail at a point between the old mills and the Turners Falls-Gill bridge, head up the hill past the Great Falls Discovery Center to an ice cream shop on the main drag, and get a flavor-of-the-day soft yogurt cone.

The ice cream shop is one of those little establishments, sadly becoming rarer in American life, that seems to concern itself at least as much with what it gives as with what it gets from customers, one of those places that seems to become a neighborhood, in and of itself, every time you walk in. If you order a small cone, they put enough ice cream or yogurt on it so you have to out-lick the melting on a summer day.

They have tables outside, and if the flavor of the day is delectable enough and the sunlight hits you just right, you might begin to wonder what all the fuss is about, in you and in the world. I’ll even offer, at the risk of being scoffed at, that a seat at a street cafe in Paris might be better than the one in which you are sitting at such a moment, but not by much.

The Nobel Prize winning Portuguese writer Jose Saramago wrote, “Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.” I think every person carries with them every moment they’ve ever lived. In that sense, who they are becomes a line drawn by the continuum of their moments. As I write this, it occurs to me that the above three described habits might curve the line of my life, perhaps ever so slightly, upward.

Saramago also wrote, “A journey never ends. Only the travelers end.” In the meantime, I’ll keep on pedaling.

Amherst resident Richard McCarthy, a longtime columnist at the Springfield Republican, writes a monthly column for the Gazette.

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