I imagine you must be wondering if I had run out of brilliant true stories to tell you, but alas, I have more than enough stories to fill a lifetime and so, here is yet another one.
This time I am going to take you back to many moons ago, way back to 1981 when I was just 13 years old. I guess it could have been '82 now that I think about it, but the older I make myself in this story the more idiotic I look to the outside world. Hmm. Wait...I suddenly realized that during the course of the writing of this blog all I have managed to do is make myself look incredibly idiotic so I suppose it matters not one bit whether I was 13 or 14 at the time this incident took place, as there would be many more times in my future life that I would have the opportunity to be ridiculous.
I must first preface by telling you that I was prompted to write about this incident when Doug brought home two (almost) new scooters last week that he had acquired through one of our tenants who no longer had a need for them. Doug, seeing that we have several teenagers, found it highly probable that someone at our house might want to ride them around town so he bought them. After expressions of glee by all the children still living at home, Doug took the younger ones across the street to the high school parking lot for a tutorial on proper riding. I wondered over later with the intention of just watching them but found myself on the back of one of the scooters-about to relive my experience from the early eighties which was the first and last time I have ever attempted to ride a motorcycle.
As a girl growing up with a bunch of brothers, I was forced to put up with all kinds of garbage, like being forced to learn how to ride dirt bikes. Well okay, 'forced' probably isn't quite the right word. Actually, I begged my older brother to teach me how to ride because I wanted to go out and experience for myself what seemed to drive the men in my family to near drunken excitement when it came to anything loud and possessing it's own motor.
With as little enthusiasm as he could muster, my older brother reluctantly took me out to the back yard to teach me the logistics of riding such a machine. There was alot to think about. The clutch had to be let out slowly while the gas had to be given gradually at the same time. I learned about shifting gears, where the brakes were etc. Finally I climbed on and kicked that puppy to life, extremely proud of myself for doing so on the first or second try. Then came the hard part. I kept killing the motor by letting the clutch out too fast and not giving it enough gas. Over and over I had to restart the bike while my increasingly impatient brother kept reminding me that the key was to slowly let off the clutch. I was fantastic at listening, because after that I just kept giving the bike lots of gas, revving up the engine and then letting the clutch out way too fast and killing the machine.
After about the seventy-fourth try, I was sure I had the concept down. I started up the bike and held on tight to the clutch, gave it a little gas, a little more, and then let out the clutch gradually, slowly. I gassed it a bit more, one hand on the gas, one hand on the clutch, letting it out slow, feet in position, ready to shift...all at once I got brave and let the clutch out way too fast while giving it way too much gas. The bike sputtered but shot forward and took off like a rocket. I had finally done it, the bike was moving fast, the only problem this time was that I was no longer on the bike. My hands were still holding tight to the handlebars, inadvertently pulling on the gas, but the rest of my body was running wildly behind it trying to keep up, screaming frantically while my brother stood by yelling "Let go of the gas you idgit!"
Around and around the backyard I ran, holding onto the bike for all I was worth, screaming "Ah! Ah! Ah!Ah!" in short little bursts of terror, and all that time my brother just kept yelling at me to let go of the gas. A simple thing really, to let go of the gas. The bike would just stop moving then. But I just could not do this no matter how I tried. You see, after careful analyzation of this procedure, it has dawned on me that when a person is truly terrified, the tendency seems to be that they tense up, therefore causing ones hands to ball into fists. I believe this to be the phenomena that I experienced that day, so I really couldn't help it. In fact, the more frightened I became, the more my hands would tighten up and the faster the bike would go until I was screaming at a fevered pitch, unable to keep my wildly running legs up to speed. I finally let go of the bike out of sheer exhaustion. It crashed into the back of the house and fell over like a dead dog. Needless to say, my desire to ride a motorcycle never resurfaced and my brother called me an idgit (whatever that meant) for the next two months. So, the other day when I found myself on the back of one of the new scooters, I was reminded of this experience when I suddenly realized that I was headed straight for a fence. I was able to stop myself just in time but I realized with horror that I was again experiencing the same strange problem I had in my youth which I have now named "idgit-itis". Apparently I am the only person in the U.S who suffers from this dreaded disease. Lucky me.
P.S. - My brother has just informed me that I failed to spell the word 'idgit' correctly so I have gone back and edited that word, but I would also like to tell my brother that I did a spell check on that word and it was not a word that is recognized by the spell checking system, which simply tells me that people who know how to spell bad words are dumb. The end.
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