I really shouldn’t be alive today 
but I am, so I might as well write about why I shouldn’t be. 

2002, the worst year of my life, begins innocently. My wife has set her heart on a motorcycle. (Twenty years earlier I’d almost gotten one, but after the endless barrage of gruesome horror stories from friends, family and total strangers, I wrapped up my dream and stashed it away in a cast iron vault, deep in the Maybe Next Life Room.) After months of cycling conversation and intense scrutiny of related feelings, I embrace my wife’s dream. Since we do almost everything together, the image of her riding off into the sunset alone on her bike just didn’t fit into our picture-perfect marriage.

Mid-February we fly to Minnesota for a week. After a year of leasing our home there, we sell it, pack the rest of our worldly possessions in a U-Haul and drive back to NC, where we’ve lived for the past year and a half: debt-free, dream-filled and a Motorcycle Safety Course in our near future. As I peruse the myriad of motorcycle offerings, a mid-sized cruiser catches and keeps my eye--a Kawasaki Vulcan 800. I am enthralled with our new venture in the two-wheeled world.

March storms into my life with a fury. During the first week, I am hit by three huge emotional trucks. One day my wife informs me: “I didn’t really want you to have a motorcycle; it’s my dream.” SLAM. As I struggle to get up from that unexpected collision: “And I don’t want to sleep with you; I just want to be friends.” BAM. While trying to pull a few brain and heart cells together to rise a couple of inches off the pavement: “And I don’t think I want this marriage anymore.” CRASH. All our friends and family are shocked. I feel betrayed, crushed, angry, ashamed, but ready to renew, reinvent, do whatever it takes, alone, together or with a therapist. Two months later she is gone, no second chance, no extra mile, no clear reason except she said she had changed. HIT-N-RUN.

I’ve never felt pain like this, relentless, deep, where a pill won’t reach. I understand why people kill themselves, just to stop the pain. Spring green turns gray. Blazing blooms become black and white. Music, food, and places we used to love together now tear me apart. Nothing matters. My chest is vacant. I am lost in a vast sea of sadness, alone in a tiny boat with one oar, rowing around in circles. Somehow, time begins to heal. Good books, faithful family, fine friends, fresh dreams, swing dance lessons, daily roller blading, intense exercise, silence, prayer and travel are the building blocks of a new foundation. I wrap up eleven years of tarnished memories and broken promises, seal them into that cast iron vault and bury them in the backyard of my brain. Colors come back. Today finally starts to feel good again. 

I begin a list of reasons why it’s better she’s gone:
1. I can play Anton Bruckner symphonies 
any time of the day or night, as loud as I want.
2. Vivaldi the Cat is not banned from the bedroom
 and sleeps with me at night.
3. Every day I save money on snore pills 
since Vivaldi has not complained once. Yet.
Hey, it’s not a great list, but it’s a start. My Vulcan is my life saver. It’s fun, it’s fast, it’s freedom. It helps me forget. It takes my mind off the past and future and locks it onto the present. Safe riding demands that I focus on the road right in front of me and a few seconds ahead. I’d never have guessed I’d be the one riding off alone. Screw the sunset. I’m riding off into the sunrise.

July 27 begins splendidly. For the past decade this day had been the anniversary of a model marriage. This year it’s a celebration of myself, my cycle, my friends. A celebration of today. A celebration of 7000 miles on my cycle in a short four months of riding. It is a classic, great day in the morning. Up at dawn, on the cycle by seven, a perfect Saturday at seventy degrees. Mist rises in the hollows, rabbits sit beside the road like old hobos, the mountains beckon on the northern horizon. I ride up Route 66, a twisting, turning gem of a road, to Squirrel Spur, another choice winding byway to the Blue Ridge Parkway.

I savor a tasty breakfast with my innkeeper friends at Dutchies View in Woolwine, VA as we plan the anniversary party for their B&B the next day. I’d written festive lyrics to several familiar songs: The B&B Beatles Medley. I’d also taken my slide show out of the moth balls and was ready to take it back on the road to the mountains of Woolwine. Lately I hadn’t felt particularly funny and any song I started to write seemed passionately pointless with no one to sing it to. (I certainly didn’t want to hear it.) The inspiration of Dutchies’ anniversary changed my heart and I was charged to be part of an event that respected the past, celebrated the present and honored a commitment to the future.

I leave Dutchies around noon, heading for Shooting Creek, a snake of a road that slithers through the
backwoods and seems to go up as much as ahead. It’s like riding a roller coaster with your own private car. I fill my saddle bags with fresh-picked mountain peaches and set off to deliver them to old friends I’d known for 30 years on a farm in Floyd County. Somehow I even manage to deliver two hot lattés, balanced on my bike, to a friend working at the Floyd Public Library.

After a few hours of playing the Johnny Appleseed of peaches and lattés, I head home down Route 8 to get ready for an evening of dancing with the Kings of Swing in Greensboro, a fitting finale to my personal
celebration. I’d recently taken enough swing dance lessons to have enough courage to put all those
individual moves together into a three-minute song with someone I didn’t know and, depending on my
performance, wouldn’t ever have to see again.

It is a perfect afternoon. Cotton ball clouds cruise the Carolina Blue sky. Crape myrtle blooms shout purple, pink and white along the road. The curves widen as the country gives way to the city of Winston-Salem ahead. All is good.

Ecstasy to catastrophe instantaneously.
I remember three moments…
A car is speeding toward me in my lane.
IMPACT.
Voices from far, far away get real, real close as I gain consciousness. “Don’t move his head!” “They’ve gone after her.” “Was anyone else on your bike with you?” “Lay still. Where are you hurt?”

Moment One. It’s a postcard, no motion, just a snapshot, a close-up of the front end of a white car, right in front of me. I see a couple feet of roadway between the car and the right shoulder. No time to get there, no time to swerve, no time to finish the thought.
Moment Two. IMPACT is a split second of sound and sensation. I’m told I was thrown thirty feet. (I take a nap during this part of the afternoon. Flying through the air with a blanket, a pillow and a smile on my face, I dream of telling someone the joke: “What did the fish say when it swam into the wall? Dam.”)
Moment Three. Imagine waking up on the couch to find yourself watching a black and white movie in a dark room on an old TV with lousy reception. Slowly you realize you’re in the movie, lying on the ground. No, it’s not a movie, this is your life, you can start screaming now. The good news: I’m listening to what’s happening around me and not watching my entire life flash in front of my eyes. The bad news: all the parts of me that aren’t in shock are in pain. I wish it were a dream, I could go back to sleep on that couch and wake up yesterday.

I focus on breathing as deep as my bruised ribs will allow and meditate on the 99.9999999999 percent of my being that is spirit instead of the .00000000001 percent that’s human, solid and/or fractured. Maybe my time is up, my number has been called, I have a meeting with my maker that didn’t make my appointment book. Maybe I only have a few more moments. If so, I’ll go gently, a gentle man, the way I feel I’ve lived my life.

Website Hosting Donated by Sites Computer Resources, Inc.