motorcycles
take this with a grain of salt, at least. one of my first push-around-on-the-floor toys was a plastic motorcycle-with-rider. the rider wore a blue uniform with goggles and a peaked and billed cap. obviously a cop, but what did I know about cops when I was months old. that would come later. but according to witnesses who have conveniently left, I loved that toy and damn near wore it out either gnawing on it or pushing it around on the floor. also according to those witnesses, I early on learned to accompany the pushing around with "vroom! vroom!" fast forward 14 years to a boy who's doing well at being a paper boy and have his manager say something like "suppose I quintuple the size of your paper route, can you handle the responsibility?" what does a boy who has no idea what that means but loves the idea of lots more money say? "sure!" that's what he says. have his manager say, "okay report to your paper pickup corner next Wednesday with a motorscooter, and between now and then, memorize this map. oh, and sign this contract and have your mother sign it, then mail it to the newspaper office downtown." damn, things were simpler then, weren't they?" since you're kind, have his grandfather be visiting, and have him jump into the boy's conversation with his parents. "I'll co-sign," the grandfather says, then takes the boy to the bank the next morning where they borrow more money than a motorscooter will cost. then they go to the Lambretta store because there was no such thing as a Harley-Davidson motorscooter. and the granddaddy was right, of course. you couldn't just buy a motorscooter, you needed to buy a jacket and a cap and a pair of boots, at the very least. but you also needed to buy a set of tools, a measuring bottle that would hold eight ounces of oil for when you needed to fill up with a gallon of gasoline. and even then we weren't done. we had to go to a coffee shop to celebrate, and for him to explain to me how big a deal I had taken on, that this wasn't a disguised gift, that I actually had to pay the money back. didn't matter. I was still dazzled by it all. and while I had that paper route, I did pay my granddaddy back and I rode that Lambretta everywhere except to school. I only lived a block from school, so riding it to school would have been more trouble than it was worth. let the world roll by about two decades, I am in graduate school and have to start work at White Sands Missile Range again (I had worked there as an undergraduate) which means I have to get to the terminal where U.S. Army buses picked up workers and took them to the range. a bicycle would have done, of course, but I could buy a motorcycle from a friend. well, sort of a motorcycle: a 55 cc step-through Honda. two things made it a motorcycle instead of a motorscooter: it had real wire-spoke strung wheels instead of those silly little balloon tire wheels, and its engine displacement was 55 cc instead of 50 cc. and it worked fine until I missed the bus again, and again, and again. I think that was it. three times I rode that poor little barely motorcycle 60 miles to work, climbing 1500 feet and dropping 1500 feet on the other side of the pass on the way to and from the base. oh dear. I killed that little motorcycle. so I bought a "real" motorcycle, a Honda 350 cc cruiser-ish. and luck was with me. a friend called with an offer of a real job in aerospace engineering again. it paid a real salary. but I had to move to Denver or thereabouts. I accepted. we moved. I rode my new Honda 350 cc from Las Cruces, New Mexico, to Denver, Colorado, and a motorcyclist was fixed, like a photograph is fixed during the development process. I rode that Honda 350 cc twin everywhere, like I had my Lambretta. onto and around Colorado's mountains, alongside Grand Lake, into Wyoming, to work and back from the foothills, everywhere. my aerospace jobs continued, and I rode a Honda 400 cc triple, then a Yamaha 500 cc twin, then a Honda 750 cc four-cylinder. Ooo! then I bought a Harley, a Sportster, and rode that motorcycle everywhere for years, until finally I bought a Harley NightTrain. oh my goodness! I rode that to Oakland and back, to Milwaukee and back by way of Washington, D.C., and Knoxville and Dallas and Alamogordo and the Grand Canyon, to Denver and back, to Albuquerque and back! oh damn, I loved that NightTrain! and I outrode my strength for riding a Harley and had to give it up. damn! but I rode motorcycles, real motorcycles for forty years, and I rode one Harley and then another for twenty of those. yes, I appreciate motorcycles. still smile to hear them ride by, or to see a string of them on the freeway. go riders! especially go Harley-riders!
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