David,
Thanks for the note. I considered keeping my Yamaha 920 when I retired to San
Jacinto, but the streets and driveways are slanted and crooked here and the 920
has a very tricky side stand. That bike fell over on me often parked out
alongside various McDonnell Douglas & Boeing buildings in Long Beach. It would
have done even more poorly in San Jacinto. Besides, once I retired I planned
to take my dogs along as much as possible, and I never like driving just for
driving's sake -- at least not much beyond the joy of having my first few cars.
When Susan and I were first married, we had very little money and we each had a
Ford Pinto which were taking turns going into the shop. It was Susan who
suggested that we get a motorcycle to ride to work. I applied my engineering
knowledge and bought a Kawasaki 200 because it was structurally strong enough
to carry both of us and got something like 80 miles to the gallon. The engine
was strong enough to take us to work at freeway speeds. After a year or so the
engine began using too much oil; so I got a Yamaha SR500 -- a very sturdy
reliable bike. Susan was still working in those days, but her illness was
affecting her. She would doze off as she rode behind me down between the lanes
of the 405 freeway. I could always tell because the front of her helmet would
bang against the back of mine. When that happened I would move over into the
right lane and slow down for the rest of the trip.
I bought the Yamaha 920 so we could take longer bike trips, but as soon as I
got it Susan became seriously ill and the bike developed engine problems that
Yamaha took a very long time to admit. It wasn't until something broke through
and cracked the crank case that they decided to fix the engine.
Lawrence
-----Original Message-----
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On ;
Behalf Of david ritchie
Sent: Friday, May 31, 2019 9:06 PM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: My Last Bike
I’d write, that’s the one I like, but it’s not true. That’s the one that hits
me where things hurt. I had a dream last night about riding a motor bike. It
was surely about my father, who gave us two rules: no motor bike, no drugs. He
had shared ownership of a motor bike just after the war and always refused to
say if his fake tooth had something to do with the ban. I loved the moped I
had in France and recently read a New York Times piece about an American
company that started out making mopeds and now makes custom, low-powered bikes
based on a Honda engine. I was tempted. My father is dead, so the promise is
no longer in force. But there are plenty of other things to do in life and my
next-door-neighbor growing up, the one who didn’t found the band Tyrannosaurus
Rex, did kill his best friend simply by taking him for a ride on the back of
his new bike. Everyone I knew in college rode a motor bike. My best friend
had a Czech bike. The guy whose parents owned our rental had a Triumph
Trident. The girl everyone liked rode an ex-army BSA. And me? I had a
two-stroke SAAB 96, which worked some of the time and lasted about nine months
before it finally died.
Vehicle memories are important to some of the human race.
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest
on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
<http://www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html>
