The Yellow Backpack Guy

 While cycling to work today I caught up with another cyclist at a stop light. A 20-something young man briefly turned his head around and cordially said "hello". Then a few seconds later he turned back around again and proclaimed, "Hey, you're the yellow backpack guy"!  I smiled and replied, "Yes, I *am* the yellow backpack guy". (BTW, the windbreaker I put over my backpack is bright green, not yellow.) He enthusiastically told me how he had taken notice of me many times during the previous winter each time he would drive by me. He told me that he finally decided that if I could ride during cold winter days, so could he. I smiled and reminded him that the weather was not yet cold. The light changed and I quickly pulled away from the newbie cyclist feeling good about having unknowingly set an example that helped motivate someone to switch from riding to work in a car to commuting by bicycle.

On my ride home, I came upon another cyclist who was changing a flat tire. I stopped and asked whether he needed help. He said that his bottle of compressed air had malfunctioned and a small air pump was not working. Since I had a pump, I stopped to help him, which turned out to be a good idea since he soon disclosed that this was his first changing of a flat tire. It turned out that the reason his pump and compessed air wasn't inflating his replacement tube was because the spare tube had a visible hole in it. After he reinstalled another spare tube that I gave him and started to pump up the tube, the tip of the valve stem broke off inside the air pump. Not withstanding the broken valve stem, the tube still held air, so I helped him pump up the tire as much as possible and he installed the wheel back on his bike.  When he tried to pay me for the tube, I told him to pay it forward. As we were getting ready to leave, he asked me how far I was going. When I replied that my destination was near the confluence of the 55 and 22 freeways, he seemed shocked and said that was a long ways away. He was only was going as far as Jamboree Road.  I again felt good on the ride home for having been able to make a difference by helping somebody.