I learned how to ride a pedestrian-accelerator bike as soon as I grew into my older sister's bicycle, but I was in my late twenties or early thirties when I acquired a road bike and learned how to use it.

The prison doors opened!   For the first time in my life, I could leave the house without being carried by someone whose schedule I had to take into consideration.

A few years later I decided to get a driver's license and not count how many sixteen-dollar hours it took, but the bike remains my favorite way of getting around.  There are many places one can't go in a car, and the car is better only when I want to buy more than will fit into two paper grocery bags, or the distance is so great that I would have to stay overnight along the way if I went by bike.

And the latter isn't much of a consideration now that it isn't safe for me to drive when it's time for my after-lunch nap.   Riding a bike keeps my metabolism up and I can stay out all day, if I don't stay in a store too long at a time.

Bike riding is even more important now that I need regular exercise to keep my walker in the corner serving as a clothes rack, and the walker wouldn't be out of the corner very long before I started shopping for an electric wheelchair.

I'm incapable of working for the sole purpose of getting tired, and cycling is the only exercise that gets one anywhere.  Parking in the far corner of the parking lot, pushing my cart down every aisle, and always returning the cart to the store instead of the corrall help, but not all that much.

Meanwhile, I've become utterly dependent on my spouse (and visa-versa, but that is irrelevant to my problem).  I've been letting him do the chores I dislike so long that I've no idea how to do them myself, and I don't even know what chores I would need to learn.

So that now that he's in fragile health, I don't want him to experience any stress that I can fend off.

He has gotten it into his head that cycling is bad for me, and frets terribly all the time I'm gone.  I finally got through to him that my doctors approve of cycling, but he has switched to fretting that a reckless driver will mow me down.

I pointed out that there have been three instances of reckless drivers going through the walls of occupied buildings within walking distance of our house -- by three separate miracles, nobody was in the space the vehicle came to occupy -- but that only made matters worse.

So how can I keep him around to be taken care of, and at the same time keep me around to take care of him?