vroom

Joanna has just left a plaintive note in my comments wondering if I will be back, which naturally triggers the creative juices. There's nothing quite as inspiring as feeling loved. While it's true that I've been trying to finish this entry anyway and probably would have posted it today with or without enticements, nonetheless there's a feeling of gratuitous pleasure in thinking I'm performing a customer service. A happy customer makes a happy consumer.

Also, fewer phone calls to one's boss.

Of course, I promised myself that I would stop talking about my wedding by the end of the month, and here it is, and I haven't gotten half the stories out the door.

Oh well. My own fault. I suppose what that means is that I'll continue to spring them on you at unexpected moments, whenever the whim hits me. Well, what're you going to do? That's the problem with cyber real estate. There are no zoning rules. That, however, has nothing to do with anything.

Anyway: hi, Joanna! And here's one just for you.

Perhaps as a counterbalance to the utterly satisfying indolence of the weekend, the work week began with the proverbial lion. I've been percolating with rage since Monday, and it has started to take on the awesome stature of an overambitious French pastry. It lives independent of me, in other words, like rising dough. Or, to take my metaphors into a completely different direction, one of those ghosts who sporadically possess blond little 9-year olds and spew obscenities at passersby. You know what I mean. Like Dick Cheney.

My mother is "in town" this week, if you can imagine a town that runs the full stretch of Northern California. She flew down on July 4th to stay with us for a day, before heading up to Santa Rosa for a Suzuki Institute. The Guy, who in the interval between betrothal and marriage managed to come to a detente with his mixed feelings regarding my mother, bore up tolerably well under the stress of seeing her again so soon. His life has been fairly calm since the middle of June, when our respective families returned to their respective homes. It served as a sort of parole during which he could regain his equanimity. He came with me to the airport to pick her up, and passed over with remarkable aplomb the awkward moment when hugs were (or maybe not) dispensed between son-in-law and mother-in-law.

She was fairly cheerful during her one-night stay, and acted with great restraint, managing to neither clean my apartment from top to bottom, nor lapse too frequently into the sort of Japanese commentary that the Guy, I think, finds disconcerting. When one's wife and mother-in-law begin to chatter in a foreign language, one has to have a monumental self-assurance not to suspect they are in fact talking about one in front of one's face. My mother -- who is still not entirely positive whether his name is "Yen" or "Yan" -- has a habit of repeating his name over and over at random intervals in the conversation until she thinks she has gotten it right. Besides this one trait however, she behaved herself quite well. To the Guy, over whom she holds the rights of the High, the Middle, and the Low Justice, this must have been something of a relief.

The real reason that the Guy is so calm is the therapy of the road, and the acquisition of a motorcycle. A few weeks before the wedding, he became the smug owner of a new sport bike. This is to replace his last motorcycle, currently in the hands of a mechanic friend who has developed towards it some of the abusive-possessive tendencies of a jealous husband. It seems unlikely that the Guy will ever see it again -- and in any case, he no longer cares. His new toy is better. The 2004 Yamaha FZ6. 600cc, liquid-cooled, DOHC, inline 4-cylinder, 16 valves, Group Fuel Injection, 36mm throttle bodies, 65.5 x 44.5mm, compression ratio of 12.1:1...

...I understood none of that.

While I admit that the motorcycle is cool in a way that I could never hope to achieve without props, it has had a debilitating effect on the Guy's character. More than once I've caught him attempting to sneak out of the apartment, creeping quietly about the closet while my attention is diverted elsewhere. He is a safe rider, thorough in his attention to detail, but this simply serves to encumber him when he would most like to be spry and quick. His full-body riding suit from Aerostitch combines the armor of a paranoid turtle with the vivid visibility of a large construction vehicle, being a garish yellow interspersed with reflective silver strips. To watch him attempt to steal out undetected is rather like watching the mutant offspring of Big Bird and Snuffleupagus trying to blend in with a group of touring midgets.

He actually obtained permission for the purchase through a strategic feat reminiscent of my sister's best. I was sent to the far wilds of Tennessee by the purple monkeys for several days, and on my return after 10 hours of travel, he met me at the Oakland airport. 1:00 in the morning. I was tired. I was exhausted. I was -- and this is critical -- inattentive.

"I missed you," he said, and took my carry-on bags from me.

"Okay," I said, and submitted blearily to a hug.

"Do you want some water?" he wondered while we waited for my luggage, and went to buy me some.

"Okay," I said, and nodded drowsily at the carousel.

"Can I buy a motorcycle?" he asked in the car, as I was dropping off.

"Okay," I yawned, and fell asleep. I think I heard him say "Yay!" as I was doing it.

When I woke up, he'd bought it.

I narrated the story to a customer in New York, who revealed himself to be a motorcycle fanatic after some chance comment I made about the weather. "Motorcycling weather," I called it, thinking about the ride the Guy had given me to work that morning. The customer pounced on the phrase and began to dig, coming up very shortly against the shallow limits of my knowledge about the subject. "Two-wheeled" is pretty much the extent of my understanding in that regards, while my interest in it is mainly in the fact that it's fast, and not just in that whorish, look-at-me! way.

"I don't mind that he bought a motorcycle. It's just funny," I assured my customer, after having lowered myself in his esteem by knowing nothing about its make, its model, or any of a million other exotic mysteries. ("I don't know. It's ... silver?")

The customer lapsed into an awed silence, then said with some emotion, "I need to take lessons from your husband."

To be fair, the motorcycle is not an unwelcome addition to our little family, which now consists of one Honda CR-V, one Honda Civic, one Honda Superhawk, one Honda *POS* Nighthawk, and one Yamaha. It took me some time to warm up to it, true, and even now I suspect my level of enthusiasm is not to on par with what the Guy would like me to show. On the other hand, riding behind the Guy when he takes it out for a spin....

...priceless.

As a wedding present from him to me (or, depending on how you look at it, from me to him) I'm scheduled to take motorcycle classes at the end of July. This is something in the nature of a passport to Coolness, at least as it was encapsulated in my years entombed in public schools. There is very little about me that is compatible with the established notions of popularity in the high school suburbs of Washington, and though it never failed to baffle me, my prediliction for classical music seemed somehow to ensure my miserable residence in the hospice for the terminally nerdy.

That was then. This is now. I will be able to ride a motorcycle. That mere fact will elevate me out of government-sponsored asylum to the halls of private health care. Already I have boots and a leather jacket, both an imposing black. In my imagination I'm a Cool Rider, with the figure of Audrey Hepburn, the hard edge of Lauren Bacall, and the sultry seduction of Ella Fitzgerald.

And if it weren't for all these damned reflective windows everywhere, I'd be set.