Amor fati.

This story doesn’t start where you might think it would. It doesn’t start when I was 8 years old and my dad happened by on his Honda while I was being harassed by some other kids on the walk home from school and rescued me. That didn’t make me want a motorcycle. It doesn’t even start when I was 13, when I swung a leg over my very own second-hand Broncco minibike and headed off to a nearby gravel pit to be humbled by my rich friends on their Honda 70s. With the muscle car era at its apogee, there were bigger fish to fry in the fire of my puberty. The Broncco was just a bit of distraction until I could get my driver’s license. Cars would take up residence in my soul soon after and would not release me for decades. The story didn’t begin with a motorcycle at all, actually. It began with a bad year.

We all have bad years, so I won’t dwell on the details. Suffice to say it has been a cocktail of sudden, unfair family deaths, various crises for the living, a health scare for my wife. Life. A bit concentrated, time wise, but life. A funny thing happens when you hit your 50s: You realize that you can – you must – decide how you’re going to let this stuff define you for the time you have left. When you’re younger, you think in shorter horizons. Bad things set you back, even change your course, but they don’t leave such distinct marks on you. Once you’re in the middle of life, though, you are more of a fixed thing. The cement isn’t wet anymore, and the cracks and chips are permanent. So you have to decide.

I decided on a muggy August morning, while I was waiting to get the oil changed in my truck. The bad year was in full swing, and I guess I was having one of those ‘is this as good as it gets?’ moments, sulking a little. Killing time, I wandered into a Yamaha dealer nearby, a place I’d done some business in the past, just to say hello. And then I sat on a bike. And then I picked up an MSF brochure. And then I said, “fuck it,” called the number and signed up for a course in September on the spot. Just like that. No meditation, no biblical epiphany, no heroic moment of clarity. I just decided.

I took the course during a weekend of cold, unrelenting rain, passing without distinction. The dates had fallen just a week after cancer took my brother in law, as it happened. Going anyway was probably stupid, but it felt like some kind of gesture. Amor fati. I had my M2, and a fresh reminder of my mortality. Now I needed a bike.