Another Memoir Memory

Back in Oberlin (well, Russia Township, just outside of Oberlin), after my first wife left, taking our two children with her, I bought a 350 Honda motorcycle from a friend at work (US Steel at the time), who had been an apprentice machinist with me. He had extended the front fork and made the bike into a hard-tail. It was long, sleek, black, and chrome.

While we (my brother, his friend, and I) were forming our acoustic trio (restaurant and bar band) and performing (mostly weekends), I started riding the Honda everywhere. I’d travel out to Vermillion On The Lake and hang out with the artist community that lived next to a bar and in among cottages along the beach and shoreline.

After hanging out and partying with them, I’d head home in the ‘wee hours of the morning’. My usual route was east on US 6 & 2, then south on Sate Rt 58 to Oberlin Rd. It was a curvy road with a set of east-west bound RR tracks a couple of miles in. There was a little grade up to the tracks and a declining grade on the other side of them. I frequently laid into the curves before the tracks, nearly dragging my knee on the pavement, and hit the throttle at the up grade, launching myself over the tracks, landing smoothly on the down grade. It was exhilarating.

And sometimes I’d take on the persona of my Black Knight (from another poem I wrote a couple of years before that) and rear my steed on its back wheel for a short sprint after a stop sign at a deserted interjection, then drop into a dead run, spitting flames from the tailpipes like Ghost Rider, the exileration of my Mr. Hyde side before reverting back to the everyday nobody of my normal persona.

It’s a fond memory, but I don’t indulge those appetites anymore. Haven’t since my second wife talked me into giving up the bike once we committed to each other…

–LE