I have just done a 4 hour rabbit hole on Sheldon Brown's site. I grew up in Lincoln, MA, riding French bicycles. Without being overly sentimental, it is clear that our lives overlapped enormously (I related strongly to his stories of Harvard Square, a place where I lived a huge chunk of life before being moved out along with the other intellectual trash in the Great Rent Control Repeal of 1995, may the Realtors Association of Massachusetts forever burn in Cambridgeport or Davis Square or whatever other trendy hell they've concoted).
Sheldon was, apparently, a wonderful person. This was clearly lost on me, and I can firmly assert that on 8/28/04 (the date on the Harris Cyclery receipt) I was pretty much a jerk. I wish I'd been able to appreciate him more at the time. Yes, you guys are right: him having worked on it adds to the sentimentality of the bike.
His journal made me nostalgic for the Boston of better times: when nerds, professors, strippers, prep school twits and artist-bartenders crowded into old colonial buildings with terrible plumbing and scowling neighbors. As a kid, I rode 25, 35, 50 mile rides around Lincoln, Concord, Carlisle, Harvard, Groton ... the same places that he took photos were the backdrop for the first several decades of my life.
The "license" on the bike is from the Town of Concord. In their infinite wisdom, the fine folk in charge of that (forever uptight and never as cool as Lincoln) burgh decided in the 70's that you couldn't simply ride a bicycle down the street: you had to be licensed. Real cops would give you a real ticket if you weren't, and true to Concord's core value of plutocracy, the license was $25 (no small sum in the 70's).
That Peugot has been ridden over almost ever road in Middlesex County, many times. When the bike is once again able to be ridden, I think I'll ship it to Boston and ride it there, over the same roads and past the same fields. I am sure that the newly arrived habitants (one of whom leveled my father's lovely former home in the Estabrook woods to erect a monument to poor taste and ego) will lean on the horns of their $85,000 SUV's and try to push me off the road. Let them.
I'd love to get the Brown family to come with me.