The Beginning...

Day One:

Being in academia teaches a person to analyze, to ask again and again, “What does this mean?”  And if academia doesn’t teach a person to ask this, then certainly studies in English literature do.  I have spent my entire adult life being “an English major” – immersing myself in the language that I love, reading novels and poems, writing critical essays about these novels and poems, and creating my own creative writing as well.  I also teach English, and I’ve spent my entire teaching career asking my students to ask themselves the same question:  what does this mean?

Generally, this approach proves useful, even outside the classroom.  I’ve become a critical thinker, and I like to think that over the years I've encouraged a few other people down the path of critical thinking.  Using my brain in this way not only increases the trough-sized wrinkle on my forehead annually, it also helps me understand advertising; it helps me understanding movies and appreciate art.  It’s improved my understanding of other cultures and taught me to see the complexity of a global community.  It’s helped me in so many ways--until this past weekend.  When I learned most critically, and more than once, how thinking sometimes just gets in the way.

This past weekend, I took a motorcycle course to earn my endorsement so that I could become a proficient and legal motorcycle driver.  I knew it wouldn’t be an easy endeavor.  I’ve  spent many years of my adult life driving cars with manual engines, so I knew how to think about timing and shifting, and I knew how to use a tachometer.  I’d also spent the last three years as the passenger on the back of a 2009 Harley Davidson Road King, so the back of a Hawg was familiar.  And I’ve always been strong and fairly athletic, so though I didn’t expect the course to be easy, I also didn’t expect taking lessons to be incredibly difficult.  Yet it was.

In the end, I was completely unprepared for what awaited me. 

I must begin with a confession: the day after Christmas, my husband and I went out and put down a healthy down payment on a 2013 metallic blue Harley Davidson Heritage Softail Classic. This was not a impulsive decision.  We talked about this for well over a year; we planned.  When we left the house on Wednesday, we told the boys, "Don't be surprised if we come home with a new Harley."  We came home with this:

But I couldn't even drive my new Harley home from the dealership.  My husband had to.

And when I found myself exhausted at the end of a nine-hour day after trying to conduct and manage a small, nimble Honda cruiser, I found myself overwhelmed and angry that I would have purchased such an expensive item without even knowing how to use it, and, more specifically, without even knowing if I liked driving a motorcycle.  I liked riding on the back of one, sure.  Conducting an engine between your legs and making it go where you want is a whole other ball of wax.

On that first day of motorcycle school, I was the errant driver.  I was the one in a class of eleven students who after one hour on the range went careening toward the colorful strip of flags that marked the training part of the parking lot from the rest of it.  The weekend class was being held at the local community college using its facilities.  Coincidentally, this is also the community college where I teach.  While ribbons of flags cordoned off the motorcycle training space, outside of the flimsy barrier that the ribbon made, unsuspecting bystanders parked their cars for other reasons on the same campus.  Towards these cars, I bolted.  

This is what I remember thinking:  Don't panic. Oh my God. Don't panic.  As a line of parked headlights drew nearer, I thought to hit the kill switch.  Immediately the little Honda quit, as if finished with a mighty sneeze.  One of the range instructors came running up and complimented me on thinking to hit the kill switch.  "Do you know what went wrong?" he asked.  I shook my head no.  He explained that I had squeezed and turned the throttle mistaking it for the hand brake.  I was sure that I would be evicted from the class, but he told me to get back in line with the other students who were sitting on their bikes.  As I gingerly found my way to the center of the parking lot and got in back of the line, Paul, the primary instructor who was in charge of the entire weekend, found me.  "Do you know what happened?" he asked.  I nodded confidently and explained that I confused the brake and the throttle.  "Wrong!" he exclaimed. Paul explained how I'd used only three fingers instead of four on the brake.  He held up his pinky:  "This is your finger of strength," he observed.  Then he held up his middle and ring fingers: "These are your stupid fingers."  I felt the stupidity coursing through my entire body, and, at that moment, I vowed one day to ascertain what he meant.