Thursday, 4/15/10 - Lazarus' Motorcycle

Things at the office have not been going well. We underestimated a job and are now looking for creative ways to do all of the work in less time.

I have been walking from one end of the campus to the other talking to different people.

"Go see Janet." And I waddle on over to Janet's area and she tells me, "You should talk to Kim."

I wander on over to Kim's area and she tells me, "You really need to see Terry."

So I saunter on over to Terry's office... and on and on and on...

Until someone suggests that I go see Jim. Which I do.

When I knock on Jim's doorframe he is looking at his computer. As he looks up we both have a moment of recognition.

Sitting behind the desk in front of me is a man that I taught to ride a motorcycle.

OK, I didn't really teach him to ride, I just got him far enough to break his collar bone.

But that's OK because we were in the hospital parking lot when it happened so it was a very short trip to the ER.

I am rambling and you are not getting the full picture so let me tell you what happened.

I was working with Jim at a hospital in Ft. Myers, FL. At the time I was riding a Honda Shadow 900cc. This was before the BMW R100-RT.

Jim asked if I would teach him to ride so we went out into the parking lot one day and I started teaching him the same way that I was taught: pull in the clutch, put the bike in gear, let out the clutch a little then pull it in and apply the brake.

The idea behind this stop-and-go maneuver is to reinforce the use of the clutch with your left hand and the brake with your right.

I had him do this a dozen times and he seemed to have it down pretty well so I told him to let the clutch all the way out and to ride for a short distance before pulling in the clutch and applying the brake to stop.

He did that but I guess that he was concentrating so hard on the clutch and brake that he forgot to look where he was going and ran into the curb.

The bike stopped and, in slow motion, he just tipped over. Like something out of Laugh In.

I ran over, picked up the bike and helped him up. It was obvious that something was not right so we headed over to the ER and they determined that it was a broken collar bone. Ouch!

Now, twenty years later, he is sitting in front of me and we are both babbling about where we have been, what we have been doing, who we have seen and what they have been up to.

It was great to reconnect and to relive those memories and I got to thinking about the motorcycle and how much I enjoyed riding. I thought about when I learned to ride and I thought about Bill, the guy who taught me to ride.

As with Jim, I had not corresponded with Bill in many years. I did some quick math in my head and figured that if he were alive, Bill would be in his mid eighties.

The last time I spoke with Bill was about 10 years ago. He called on my cell phone while I was on vacation with my parents in Hawaii. We talked for a while about problems that he was having with his heart and the procedures he was having done. We agreed that we would meet at his place in Orange City and attend bike week together the following year.

I had heard nothing from him since that call and because he had reported some pretty serious health problems I assumed that his silence was permanent. I know that is not very optimistic but when I tried to reach him I received a message saying that his number was no longer in service.

Even if I heard from him at no other time during the year, he always called in February to make plans for bike week in Daytona but those calls just stopped. Because he lived in Connecticut we had no mutual friends that I could contact to find out about him.

Like I said, I just put two and two together and said goodbye in my own private way.

As I thought about Jim and motorcycles and Bill my phone rang and the voice on the other end was unmistakable. It sounded like it had been soaked in scotch and then smoked, slowly until it had just the right amount of grit and gumption...

It was Bill!

And, like my encounter with Jim earlier in the day, we launched into overlapping laughter and lookbacks on where we had been and where we wound up.

It seems oddly coincidental that both of these people should come back into my life at the same time.

One day I will tell you about why I stopped riding a motorcycle. But, who knows, maybe someone is telling me that it is time to start riding again...

But the best part of my day was knowing that two friends were not lying under this...



... and pushing up these ...