TheBanyanTree: Motorcycles

[tobie at shpilchas.net]

Hello friends with mobility issues, (that means all of us, either literally or figuratively)

About motorcycles:

	I knew a mild mannered sweetie pie when I was in high school — passive, a bit shy, withheld his feelings. He played the clarinet beautifully. Nicest guy you’d ever want to meet.

	He did have this thing about motorcycles though.  When he got on his trusty mount, another human being rose up and took over his  brain.  He’d speed, weave in and out of traffic, take curves on precipitous mountain roads at high speed, tilted nearly parallel to the ground at 75 mph (someone convert that into km).  He’d perform this death defying feat every week coming back to the bay area from Humboldt State University many hours north of here. 

	His mother was apoplectic about it. But then she was generally the apoplectic type. His father looked the other way, which was his chronic child rearing style, and perhaps one of the psychological underpinnings of my friend’s mobility issues.  I was 16. What did I know?  He even had a friend who’d stashed his girlfriend on the back of the cycle only to lose her screeching around a corner. That didn’t seem to inspire my friend to slow down.

	Then he went to Vietnam and had all the chances in the world to defy death, or alternatively, to meet death head on and resolve all his issues involuntarily.  But he survived. In fact, he was a corpsman (the Marine equivalent of a medic) and the only one of the five people in his unit to come home.

	Vietnam destroyed him from the inside out.  Before that, he’d had trouble speaking his heart, even speaking his mind to defend himself. After Vietnam, I could not reach him at all. He burrowed deeper and closed the lid.  Who knows what he felt, what he thought, what hurt him or what he loved?  

	But the motorcycle spark continued. Even after he sold the thing, he drove a car as if.   One of the things that he brought back from Vietnam was a dormant disease.  Later in his life it surfaced as Myelofibrosis, a vile, incurable bone marrow cancer. I took care of him in his last years. I found him the best physician at the best clinic about 60 miles from here. When he had appointments, I’d go with him to take notes and serve as advocate because he was unable to admit and report his symptoms, and refused to be alive in the world while he was in it. 

	But when we’d get into his car with him behind the wheel, he’d turn inside out.  That’s what I figured was going on. Again, he’d tailgate, drive right up behind the next car and flash his lights, weave in and out of traffic, pass on the right or left without signaling and keep up a steady stream of complaints about other people’s driving.  I was apoplectic and generally I am not the apoplectic type.  Finally, I told him that if I was going to go with him, I was going to drive.  In the passenger seat, he reverted to his ghost-like personality. But I could see him clenching his jaw.

	He died in February of 2017. He’d told me he had a backache, but that morning, he couldn’t sit up. 

	"How long have you had the backache?"

	"About a couple of weeks."

	"Why didn’t you say anything?"  It alarmed me. But, "No. Forget I asked."  I called an ambulance.

	It turned out that the backache was internal hemorrhaging, perhaps from his spleen, perhaps not. They never found out.

That’s all I know about motorcycles.


Love,

Tobie





> On Dec 28, 2018, at 3:58 PM, peter macinnis <petermacinnis at ozemail.com.au> wrote:
> 
> Yes, children, don't do motorcycles. They are the gateway to bulldozers, you know.
> 
> We have been at the beach, waving at the rare and endangered sea horses. Didn't see any, but they're like that.
> 
> p1
> 
> On 29/12/2018 10:42, trsmith44 trsmith44 wrote:
>> I do hope you will stay away from motorcycles though.  : )
> 

"Fairness is not the foundation of the law."
Feyna Alina Shapiro-Nygren, 2009



Tobie Shapiro
mailto:tobie at shpilchas.net





"Perfection is an illusion."
Meyshe Benyomen Shapiro-Nygren



Tobie Shapiro
mailto:tobie at shpilchas.net <mailto:tobie at shpilchas.net>