My Bike and Other Friends

The bicycle chapter earned its top billing: the wheel was the boy's first taste of the two things the man spent a century chasing — speed and escape — and Miller writes it the way the ancients wrote of horses: the rituals of care, the covenant of the morning ride, the specific grief of outgrowing it. Readers who think they're being teased discover, a page in, that he means every word, and that the joke and the tenderness are the same gesture: love is love, whatever it lands on.

The human portraits carry the trilogy onward from Brooklyn into the later era — the friendships of the working decades, taken one per chapter in the same order-of-appearance method, each rendered with the late style's economy: the look, the voice, the essential anecdote, the debt. Capra published it in 1978, between the trilogy's other panels, and it remains the volume that best states the whole project's creed — that a life is finally the roll call of what befriended it.

The title essay first: the racing bike of the Brooklyn years, bought, cherished, ridden at dawn, and remembered at eighty-six with undimmed specificity — the trilogy's thesis proved on two wheels. Then the friends of the later decades, chapter by chapter: the companions, patrons, and originals of the working life, each portrait built the same way — arrival, essence, anecdote, gratitude.

Like its siblings it reads best in sittings of one friend apiece; the bike deserves an evening to itself.