How I met your mother - a pashnit Mother's Day story

pashnit

Donating Member
Site Sponsor
Registered
How I Met Your Mother, a Mother’s Day story.

There was an opportunity to go to school in California and I jumped at the chance to move across the country. Flying to California didn’t sound very interesting and I came up with the idea that I would ride a motorcycle across the United States. The problem was I didn’t own a motorcycle and didn’t have a motorcycle license. But those are trivial details and I picked up a used motorcycle for a couple of hundred dollars and left a few weeks later.

I was allotted 10 days to report to my new duty station. Which meant I was able to spend 9 days wandering 5000 miles across the country. Before I left, I had made photocopies of a Road Atlas of the United States, and each morning I would take a photocopy and insert it into a zip-loc bag and scotch tape the zip-loc bag to the gas tank. Then, on the 10th day, I was front and center, checking into my new unit.

Coffee

In my second semester in school, I needed an English credit and opted to take a Creative Writing class. I was still new in town and had been in California for less than a year. The kid I randomly sat down next to in class engaged in casual conversation and we became friends. Casual conversation morphed into he asked if I wanted to go out for coffee. That was a thing in California to hang out at a coffee house and drink fancy coffee. In Wisconsin, kids got beer and hung out in a cornfield. Here it was a coffee house. I got introduced to his friend group as the kid from Wisconsin with the funny midwestern accent.

Starbucks wasn’t a thing yet and we hung out every Friday at Weatherstone’s or New Helvetia coffee houses in Midtown, a trendy area of downtown Sacramento surrounded in huge Victorian homes with 100-year-old trees lining the city streets. There were no cell phones yet, we would just meet there. Almost every Friday, I would bring fresh stacks of photos with me from motorcycle rides I had taken. The motorcycle was in every photo and the running joke was ‘Find the bike’.

The group wasn’t all guys, some of the fellas in that group had girlfriends and our Friday nights were spent sitting around talking, laughing, and drinking coffee. It was at coffee I met Sarah. The kid I had randomly sat down next to in my Creative Writing class, Sarah was his girlfriend.

Overall, my college friend group was somewhat boring at times. I didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, and didn’t even drink coffee, I would order a hot chocolate and sip it like everyone else. I didn’t own a car and my brain was constantly plotting the next big ride.

Big rides require big bikes and a Yamaha Venture 1200 showed up at my doorstep one day and I proceeded to put 60,000 miles on the bike in two years. Weeks later after that bike showed up, I rode 6000 miles in 8 days across the South in the middle of winter. Then, six months later I left on a month-long 10,000-mile journey to Alaska riding above the Arctic Circle. I had almost no money, didn’t even bring a tent, slept in parks, snuck in and out of campgrounds, and on the side of the road in the weeds. Sometimes I stayed with random people I met on the road who welcomed in the California Kid, fed me, and treated me like family. I looked military with my buzzcut flattop hair, combat boots with pants tucked in, and black flight jacket full of Marine Corps patches. It was an ice breaker and it worked great.

When I got back from the month-long solo ride, I plotted the next 10,000 journey across America from California to Nova Scotia. There was no real reason to go there other than it was the farthest point you could ride to on the East Coast. The extent of my plan was to wander across America, get a picture of the Atlantic Ocean, and ride back.

My plans got sidetracked when I saw a red and gold Triumph Spitfire for sale locally. I had not owned a car in several years and rode the motorcycle rain or shine. My college buddies all had girlfriends, but I had no car to take a girl out on a date. A British sports car that barely ran seemed like a great idea at the time. I had to pull the motor and rebuild it down to the bare block. The interior was covered in orange shag carpet you would use in your living room and I gutted the interior. I already owned a Spitfire, but it was in our barn up on blocks back in Wisconsin. I shipped my other Spitfire to me in California and combined the two cars into one using the best parts from each and met a gal a few months later. Driving my spiffy bright red convertible, we dated a few months but it didn’t last.

The Flight Nurse

During school, I had always been a business major, but got interested in the Chiropractic field & changed majors to pre-med. I had gotten friendly with a classmate in my Anatomy & Physiology class who sat right behind me. She was 10 years older than I was and a Staff Sergeant in the Air Force. I was a Corporal in the Marine Corps and we hit it off immediately with our shared military experiences. She was a Flight Nurse for the Air Force and pushing for her BSN. We dated all that semester, she was super smart, tall, and slim with long auburn hair. When the semester ended, we were both sent to our respective duty stations at the same time. She headed for an airbase in San Antonio and we traveled to Texas together. I flew back from Texas and was sent to a Marine Corps base in Oahu to work on trucks as I was a heavy truck mechanic.

When we both came back from our respective duty stations, she had time to think and didn’t feel the relationship should continue. I was heartbroken and spent the next several months writing an anthology to heal my broken heart. I couldn’t see it then, but the flight nurse breaking up with me was probably the best thing that could have ever happened.

Job offers

When I finished school, I was presented with several different job offers offering very different career paths. The last four years had been spent working nights at FedEx loading delivery vans. When I started there, our shifts started at 3 am and were four hours, as business increased, our shift extended to as long as 6 hours. We would start work at 1 am and work till 7 am when the drivers would arrive to head out to deliver all the packages. Every package had a specific place in the van and we loaded every package in numerical order. I would load three vans all at once as an endless stream of boxes, big and small, came down a four-foot-wide conveyer belt. It was an intensely fast-paced and physical job with very high turnover. I viewed it as we were paid to work out. At my yearly physical fitness test for the Marine Corps, I did 32 pull-ups. FedEx preferred to hire college kids. And they would recruit us into their management training program as we completed our studies. Several of my workmates took this route and I was offered a supervisory position at FedEx.

I had shown an interest in accounting during school and my summer job offered a booking-keeping job with on-the-job training. A previous employer also offered me the chance to get Microsoft certified and be an instructor at their computer training school. I wasn’t smart enough to understand getting Microsoft certified was likely the most lucrative offer and could have provided a pathway into the IT field which was exploding at the time. A colleague was starting a brand-new company and offered a Project Manager position at his startup. The entrepreneurial start-up sounded exciting and I gave zero thought to the overall risk involved. None of those other offers sounded very exciting, and I took the startup.

The new job involved a lot of travel around the state and I had just sold my ’90 Yamaha FJ1200 and picked up a ’93 Kawasaki ZX-11D. It was the big boy at the time, and the Hayabusa didn’t exist yet. I was into big horsepower bikes and the ZX-11D was also perfect for all-day sport-touring. It was bright red and beautiful from end to end. I rode 20,000 miles in the first year all over the state for that job. Often taking the twistiest, longest route to my destination, did my dog-and-pony show for our client, and then rode an extra day to return home while exploring new roads and photographing the journey.

The Hallway

After school ended, I had lost track of my Friday night coffeehouse schoolmates and all the kids I had hung out with. Some had real jobs, some paired up, others still had their part-time jobs from school and didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

It was the late-90s and the internet was still brand new at the time and so were websites for businesses. We hired a guy to build our start-up a website. I became immediately interested in the process even paying the design guy to come to our office to try and teach me how sites were built. It was done entirely by hand and you had to learn HTML coding to build anything. Website building programs like Frontpage or Dreamweaver didn’t exist yet.

My work encouraged me to learn HTML coding and I signed up for a class at the local community college for webpage design. The evening class after work wasn’t even at the college, it was in a random office building miles from the school. Part of passing the class was building your own webpage and the process was entirely by hand, writing the HTML code from scratch to make the page look and work right. Our instructor encouraged us to build pages about things we were interested in.

I was into motorcycles, and I had developed a hobby of taking photos of twisty roads from my travels around the state over the last few years. I had stacks of photos and a flatbed scanner at work. Back in the olden days, digital cameras didn’t exist yet and you had to take the photos, pay to get the film developed, then individually scan each photo on a flatbed scanner to acquire a file that could then be loaded into the webpage. We used a frames page format and I slowly built the webpage for the class and called it California Motorcycle Roads. Our instructor also encouraged us to acquire a domain name, and I chose Pashnit.com which was the license plate on the motorcycle. Each road in California would have its own webpage and I was going to photograph & ride every twisty road in the state.

Leaving the class several weeks in, I ran into my old college buddy from the Creative Writing class four years earlier. Coincidentally, he was taking the same class and had signed up for the night class right after mine. The usual how have you been, what have you been up to since school ended, let’s go out for coffee again just like old times. The old group met for coffee and Sarah was there. My buddy and she were still together, but in the last throes of their relationship ending.

The Photo

My sister is a professional artist and had a painting at a gallery in downtown San Francisco. The painting had to be retrieved once the showing ended and I asked Sarah if she wanted to accompany me to pick up the painting. I was the model in the painting and that seemed a good hook to get her interested to come with me. We picked up the painting at the gallery and for our first real date, we went to the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. Keith Haring was big at the time, and there was Keith Haring stuff everywhere. Since I was into photography, I asked Sarah on that first date if I could photograph her. We drove out to Ocean Beach at the end of Golden Gate Park and I shot a roll of black-n-white film against the graffiti-covered seawall near the Cliff House.

The below photo is from our very first date together.

Scraps of Paper

The two of us reconnected and built on our friendship from the coffeehouse days back in school. Sarah was Goth; she had long jet-black hair, carried a black purse shaped like a coffin, wore black every day of the week, and was a vegetarian. I was about as meat-and-potatoes midwestern clean-cut farm boy as they come, but it worked. I was enamored, smitten, and wildly attracted to your mom. We would go out to a fancy restaurant for dinner and I would scribble poetry about your mom on the edge of the menu, the placemat, even a napkin, then push the scraps of paper across the table. I still have all those scraps of paper. After six months together, Sarah gave me her grandmother’s wedding ring and said give it back when you’re ready. It was nearly 100-years old, a vintage platinum design, and a family heirloom. But I wasn’t ready and another year together passed.

I took Sarah to anything remotely motorcycle related and she didn’t seem to mind. We went to the World Superbike Races at Sears Point, Speedway Bike Races at Auburn, the Sacramento Mile to watch flat track racing, the National Motocross Championship at Prairie City, and even the local drag strip at Sacramento Raceway to watch drag racing. I wasn’t into cruisers, but that didn’t matter so we went to the EasyRiders Motorcycle Show at the local state fairgrounds. It was there we found the Teknic leather jacket I’m still wearing today. To celebrate one year together, we rode two-up to the MotoGP races at Laguna Seca. After the races, Sarah donned high heels, a long slinky dress that was skin-tight, then hiked it up and contorted onto the back of the motorcycle. We giggled our way through the cold ocean air a couple of blocks to a restaurant in Monterey to celebrate.

The Question

We rode out to the ocean together and into the mountains, but she grew to dislike riding two-up. She decided to get her own motorcycle license and took the MSF course at the local college. We bought her a Ninja 500 and we went on a couple of rides while she got used to the little Ninja motorcycle. We both rode down to Hollister to Corbin Seats and had his-and-her custom solo saddles made for our bikes. They custom make the seat while you wait and shape it just the way you like.

The biggest motorcycle event of the year in Northern California at that time was the 3-day International Motorcycle Show in the San Francisco Bay Area in December. I had been going to the show for several years and would spend all three days there. It was like a religious experience for me to go there. Gun nuts have gun shows, nerdists have Comic-con, and bikers have motorcycle shows.

Forget all the ring in the champagne glass cliches, I’d ask her there. I carried the ring around in my pocket for two days, I was so nervous, I was shaking and couldn’t get up the nerve. On the third day, we signed up for a BMW demo ride. I was out of time and it was the last day. I knew you always stopped halfway out before the group turned around and headed back to the show. At that stop, I got down on one knee, pulled your great-grandmother's ring out along the side of the road, and asked your mom to marry me. She said yes and started jumping up and down.

The High, the Low, and the Scary

I wish I could tell you the story ends here and after that, it was all butterflies and unicorns. Being with someone has its high points, low points, and really scary times. I was 28 and had never lived with a woman before. I had spent the last 10 years completely on my own, lived on both coasts, wandering around the country, and had never had a long-term relationship with a woman for more than a few months.

We got married on Mother’s Day, which also makes this our 23rd anniversary. Four months after we got married, your mom was pregnant with you and then your brother & sister followed. Those were the high points. I got your mom pregnant six times and she miscarried for three. Those were the low points. And there were scary times too.

In 2017 while leading a motorcycle tour, a blood vessel inside my brain broke and I began bleeding out inside my brain during the ride. Sarah drove 500 miles to a Neurological ICU & Stroke Center to sit with me for seven days and then bring me home. We learned later it was my third stroke. Your mom took care of me, re-learning to talk and re-learning to do basic math. Short-term memory would never really recover. Two months later, I was back leading motorcycle tours on a borrowed motorcycle since I had crashed mine during the stroke.

A mere six months after I broke the inside of my brain and we had worked together to repair it; Sarah was diagnosed with a rare cancer (five in ten million). A type of rare tumor was growing on her knee known as a clear cell sarcoma. And the roles reversed, it was my turn to take care of her. There is no rhyme or reason to cancer, and there is no why. There is only move forward. Months of tests ensued and it was determined the cancer hadn’t spread to her lymph nodes yet and could be surgically removed. Her knee was rebuilt with cadaver parts and a year-long recovery ensued to regain her ability to walk.

Winning the Lottery

If any tiny detail of this story would have been different, none of it would have happened and we wouldn’t have your mom. If I had flown to CA instead of riding a motorcycle across the country with zero experience & the ink barely dry on my new license. If the Flight Nurse hadn’t decided to call it quits. If I had taken any other job than the high-risk start-up which folded a few years later. If I hadn’t decided to build a website about motorcycle roads in California, I never would have run into my old college buddy in that hallway & reconnected with my old friend group. An unrelated series of completely random and unplanned events get us to our destination, which for me was your mom.

When the moms were handed out, we won the lottery. But you probably won’t figure that out or understand that till you’re older. Your mom has a bottomless reservoir of warmth and kindness inside her that could power a small city. She would take in every stray kitten in the neighborhood and every local kid that needed a place to hang out after school if she could.

My only goal in life is to be the old guy on the park bench holding the hand of the gray-haired lady next to me. As we turn into that gray-haired couple on the park bench, we may not look like the attached photo I took of your mom on our first date anymore, but it will be the same hand holding mine and that’s the only thing that matters.

Call your mom. It’s Mother’s Day

first-date.jpg
 
How I Met Your Mother, a Mother’s Day story.

There was an opportunity to go to school in California and I jumped at the chance to move across the country. Flying to California didn’t sound very interesting and I came up with the idea that I would ride a motorcycle across the United States. The problem was I didn’t own a motorcycle and didn’t have a motorcycle license. But those are trivial details and I picked up a used motorcycle for a couple of hundred dollars and left a few weeks later.

I was allotted 10 days to report to my new duty station. Which meant I was able to spend 9 days wandering 5000 miles across the country. Before I left, I had made photocopies of a Road Atlas of the United States, and each morning I would take a photocopy and insert it into a zip-loc bag and scotch tape the zip-loc bag to the gas tank. Then, on the 10th day, I was front and center, checking into my new unit.

Coffee

In my second semester in school, I needed an English credit and opted to take a Creative Writing class. I was still new in town and had been in California for less than a year. The kid I randomly sat down next to in class engaged in casual conversation and we became friends. Casual conversation morphed into he asked if I wanted to go out for coffee. That was a thing in California to hang out at a coffee house and drink fancy coffee. In Wisconsin, kids got beer and hung out in a cornfield. Here it was a coffee house. I got introduced to his friend group as the kid from Wisconsin with the funny midwestern accent.

Starbucks wasn’t a thing yet and we hung out every Friday at Weatherstone’s or New Helvetia coffee houses in Midtown, a trendy area of downtown Sacramento surrounded in huge Victorian homes with 100-year-old trees lining the city streets. There were no cell phones yet, we would just meet there. Almost every Friday, I would bring fresh stacks of photos with me from motorcycle rides I had taken. The motorcycle was in every photo and the running joke was ‘Find the bike’.

The group wasn’t all guys, some of the fellas in that group had girlfriends and our Friday nights were spent sitting around talking, laughing, and drinking coffee. It was at coffee I met Sarah. The kid I had randomly sat down next to in my Creative Writing class, Sarah was his girlfriend.

Overall, my college friend group was somewhat boring at times. I didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, and didn’t even drink coffee, I would order a hot chocolate and sip it like everyone else. I didn’t own a car and my brain was constantly plotting the next big ride.

Big rides require big bikes and a Yamaha Venture 1200 showed up at my doorstep one day and I proceeded to put 60,000 miles on the bike in two years. Weeks later after that bike showed up, I rode 6000 miles in 8 days across the South in the middle of winter. Then, six months later I left on a month-long 10,000-mile journey to Alaska riding above the Arctic Circle. I had almost no money, didn’t even bring a tent, slept in parks, snuck in and out of campgrounds, and on the side of the road in the weeds. Sometimes I stayed with random people I met on the road who welcomed in the California Kid, fed me, and treated me like family. I looked military with my buzzcut flattop hair, combat boots with pants tucked in, and black flight jacket full of Marine Corps patches. It was an ice breaker and it worked great.

When I got back from the month-long solo ride, I plotted the next 10,000 journey across America from California to Nova Scotia. There was no real reason to go there other than it was the farthest point you could ride to on the East Coast. The extent of my plan was to wander across America, get a picture of the Atlantic Ocean, and ride back.

My plans got sidetracked when I saw a red and gold Triumph Spitfire for sale locally. I had not owned a car in several years and rode the motorcycle rain or shine. My college buddies all had girlfriends, but I had no car to take a girl out on a date. A British sports car that barely ran seemed like a great idea at the time. I had to pull the motor and rebuild it down to the bare block. The interior was covered in orange shag carpet you would use in your living room and I gutted the interior. I already owned a Spitfire, but it was in our barn up on blocks back in Wisconsin. I shipped my other Spitfire to me in California and combined the two cars into one using the best parts from each and met a gal a few months later. Driving my spiffy bright red convertible, we dated a few months but it didn’t last.

The Flight Nurse

During school, I had always been a business major, but got interested in the Chiropractic field & changed majors to pre-med. I had gotten friendly with a classmate in my Anatomy & Physiology class who sat right behind me. She was 10 years older than I was and a Staff Sergeant in the Air Force. I was a Corporal in the Marine Corps and we hit it off immediately with our shared military experiences. She was a Flight Nurse for the Air Force and pushing for her BSN. We dated all that semester, she was super smart, tall, and slim with long auburn hair. When the semester ended, we were both sent to our respective duty stations at the same time. She headed for an airbase in San Antonio and we traveled to Texas together. I flew back from Texas and was sent to a Marine Corps base in Oahu to work on trucks as I was a heavy truck mechanic.

When we both came back from our respective duty stations, she had time to think and didn’t feel the relationship should continue. I was heartbroken and spent the next several months writing an anthology to heal my broken heart. I couldn’t see it then, but the flight nurse breaking up with me was probably the best thing that could have ever happened.

Job offers

When I finished school, I was presented with several different job offers offering very different career paths. The last four years had been spent working nights at FedEx loading delivery vans. When I started there, our shifts started at 3 am and were four hours, as business increased, our shift extended to as long as 6 hours. We would start work at 1 am and work till 7 am when the drivers would arrive to head out to deliver all the packages. Every package had a specific place in the van and we loaded every package in numerical order. I would load three vans all at once as an endless stream of boxes, big and small, came down a four-foot-wide conveyer belt. It was an intensely fast-paced and physical job with very high turnover. I viewed it as we were paid to work out. At my yearly physical fitness test for the Marine Corps, I did 32 pull-ups. FedEx preferred to hire college kids. And they would recruit us into their management training program as we completed our studies. Several of my workmates took this route and I was offered a supervisory position at FedEx.

I had shown an interest in accounting during school and my summer job offered a booking-keeping job with on-the-job training. A previous employer also offered me the chance to get Microsoft certified and be an instructor at their computer training school. I wasn’t smart enough to understand getting Microsoft certified was likely the most lucrative offer and could have provided a pathway into the IT field which was exploding at the time. A colleague was starting a brand-new company and offered a Project Manager position at his startup. The entrepreneurial start-up sounded exciting and I gave zero thought to the overall risk involved. None of those other offers sounded very exciting, and I took the startup.

The new job involved a lot of travel around the state and I had just sold my ’90 Yamaha FJ1200 and picked up a ’93 Kawasaki ZX-11D. It was the big boy at the time, and the Hayabusa didn’t exist yet. I was into big horsepower bikes and the ZX-11D was also perfect for all-day sport-touring. It was bright red and beautiful from end to end. I rode 20,000 miles in the first year all over the state for that job. Often taking the twistiest, longest route to my destination, did my dog-and-pony show for our client, and then rode an extra day to return home while exploring new roads and photographing the journey.

The Hallway

After school ended, I had lost track of my Friday night coffeehouse schoolmates and all the kids I had hung out with. Some had real jobs, some paired up, others still had their part-time jobs from school and didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

It was the late-90s and the internet was still brand new at the time and so were websites for businesses. We hired a guy to build our start-up a website. I became immediately interested in the process even paying the design guy to come to our office to try and teach me how sites were built. It was done entirely by hand and you had to learn HTML coding to build anything. Website building programs like Frontpage or Dreamweaver didn’t exist yet.

My work encouraged me to learn HTML coding and I signed up for a class at the local community college for webpage design. The evening class after work wasn’t even at the college, it was in a random office building miles from the school. Part of passing the class was building your own webpage and the process was entirely by hand, writing the HTML code from scratch to make the page look and work right. Our instructor encouraged us to build pages about things we were interested in.

I was into motorcycles, and I had developed a hobby of taking photos of twisty roads from my travels around the state over the last few years. I had stacks of photos and a flatbed scanner at work. Back in the olden days, digital cameras didn’t exist yet and you had to take the photos, pay to get the film developed, then individually scan each photo on a flatbed scanner to acquire a file that could then be loaded into the webpage. We used a frames page format and I slowly built the webpage for the class and called it California Motorcycle Roads. Our instructor also encouraged us to acquire a domain name, and I chose Pashnit.com which was the license plate on the motorcycle. Each road in California would have its own webpage and I was going to photograph & ride every twisty road in the state.

Leaving the class several weeks in, I ran into my old college buddy from the Creative Writing class four years earlier. Coincidentally, he was taking the same class and had signed up for the night class right after mine. The usual how have you been, what have you been up to since school ended, let’s go out for coffee again just like old times. The old group met for coffee and Sarah was there. My buddy and she were still together, but in the last throes of their relationship ending.

The Photo

My sister is a professional artist and had a painting at a gallery in downtown San Francisco. The painting had to be retrieved once the showing ended and I asked Sarah if she wanted to accompany me to pick up the painting. I was the model in the painting and that seemed a good hook to get her interested to come with me. We picked up the painting at the gallery and for our first real date, we went to the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. Keith Haring was big at the time, and there was Keith Haring stuff everywhere. Since I was into photography, I asked Sarah on that first date if I could photograph her. We drove out to Ocean Beach at the end of Golden Gate Park and I shot a roll of black-n-white film against the graffiti-covered seawall near the Cliff House.

The below photo is from our very first date together.

Scraps of Paper

The two of us reconnected and built on our friendship from the coffeehouse days back in school. Sarah was Goth; she had long jet-black hair, carried a black purse shaped like a coffin, wore black every day of the week, and was a vegetarian. I was about as meat-and-potatoes midwestern clean-cut farm boy as they come, but it worked. I was enamored, smitten, and wildly attracted to your mom. We would go out to a fancy restaurant for dinner and I would scribble poetry about your mom on the edge of the menu, the placemat, even a napkin, then push the scraps of paper across the table. I still have all those scraps of paper. After six months together, Sarah gave me her grandmother’s wedding ring and said give it back when you’re ready. It was nearly 100-years old, a vintage platinum design, and a family heirloom. But I wasn’t ready and another year together passed.

I took Sarah to anything remotely motorcycle related and she didn’t seem to mind. We went to the World Superbike Races at Sears Point, Speedway Bike Races at Auburn, the Sacramento Mile to watch flat track racing, the National Motocross Championship at Prairie City, and even the local drag strip at Sacramento Raceway to watch drag racing. I wasn’t into cruisers, but that didn’t matter so we went to the EasyRiders Motorcycle Show at the local state fairgrounds. It was there we found the Teknic leather jacket I’m still wearing today. To celebrate one year together, we rode two-up to the MotoGP races at Laguna Seca. After the races, Sarah donned high heels, a long slinky dress that was skin-tight, then hiked it up and contorted onto the back of the motorcycle. We giggled our way through the cold ocean air a couple of blocks to a restaurant in Monterey to celebrate.

The Question

We rode out to the ocean together and into the mountains, but she grew to dislike riding two-up. She decided to get her own motorcycle license and took the MSF course at the local college. We bought her a Ninja 500 and we went on a couple of rides while she got used to the little Ninja motorcycle. We both rode down to Hollister to Corbin Seats and had his-and-her custom solo saddles made for our bikes. They custom make the seat while you wait and shape it just the way you like.

The biggest motorcycle event of the year in Northern California at that time was the 3-day International Motorcycle Show in the San Francisco Bay Area in December. I had been going to the show for several years and would spend all three days there. It was like a religious experience for me to go there. Gun nuts have gun shows, nerdists have Comic-con, and bikers have motorcycle shows.

Forget all the ring in the champagne glass cliches, I’d ask her there. I carried the ring around in my pocket for two days, I was so nervous, I was shaking and couldn’t get up the nerve. On the third day, we signed up for a BMW demo ride. I was out of time and it was the last day. I knew you always stopped halfway out before the group turned around and headed back to the show. At that stop, I got down on one knee, pulled your great-grandmother's ring out along the side of the road, and asked your mom to marry me. She said yes and started jumping up and down.

The High, the Low, and the Scary

I wish I could tell you the story ends here and after that, it was all butterflies and unicorns. Being with someone has its high points, low points, and really scary times. I was 28 and had never lived with a woman before. I had spent the last 10 years completely on my own, lived on both coasts, wandering around the country, and had never had a long-term relationship with a woman for more than a few months.

We got married on Mother’s Day, which also makes this our 23rd anniversary. Four months after we got married, your mom was pregnant with you and then your brother & sister followed. Those were the high points. I got your mom pregnant six times and she miscarried for three. Those were the low points. And there were scary times too.

In 2017 while leading a motorcycle tour, a blood vessel inside my brain broke and I began bleeding out inside my brain during the ride. Sarah drove 500 miles to a Neurological ICU & Stroke Center to sit with me for seven days and then bring me home. We learned later it was my third stroke. Your mom took care of me, re-learning to talk and re-learning to do basic math. Short-term memory would never really recover. Two months later, I was back leading motorcycle tours on a borrowed motorcycle since I had crashed mine during the stroke.

A mere six months after I broke the inside of my brain and we had worked together to repair it; Sarah was diagnosed with a rare cancer (five in ten million). A type of rare tumor was growing on her knee known as a clear cell sarcoma. And the roles reversed, it was my turn to take care of her. There is no rhyme or reason to cancer, and there is no why. There is only move forward. Months of tests ensued and it was determined the cancer hadn’t spread to her lymph nodes yet and could be surgically removed. Her knee was rebuilt with cadaver parts and a year-long recovery ensued to regain her ability to walk.

Winning the Lottery

If any tiny detail of this story would have been different, none of it would have happened and we wouldn’t have your mom. If I had flown to CA instead of riding a motorcycle across the country with zero experience & the ink barely dry on my new license. If the Flight Nurse hadn’t decided to call it quits. If I had taken any other job than the high-risk start-up which folded a few years later. If I hadn’t decided to build a website about motorcycle roads in California, I never would have run into my old college buddy in that hallway & reconnected with my old friend group. An unrelated series of completely random and unplanned events get us to our destination, which for me was your mom.

When the moms were handed out, we won the lottery. But you probably won’t figure that out or understand that till you’re older. Your mom has a bottomless reservoir of warmth and kindness inside her that could power a small city. She would take in every stray kitten in the neighborhood and every local kid that needed a place to hang out after school if she could.

My only goal in life is to be the old guy on the park bench holding the hand of the gray-haired lady next to me. As we turn into that gray-haired couple on the park bench, we may not look like the attached photo I took of your mom on our first date anymore, but it will be the same hand holding mine and that’s the only thing that matters.

Call your mom. It’s Mother’s Day

View attachment 1666493
A beautiful lady, fine fellow and motorcycles...

Better than the script of a Hallmark movie.....

Well done you......
 
Hi. Yes that is a very tuching lifes story. And every ones story is so different. I am 73 and my girl friend is 33. I hope the photo me did not break anyone phone.

View attachment 1666507
My brother came out of a 35 yr marriage in divorce and found himself a lady 25 yrs his junior....

The standing joke is he has to take a large enough Viagra pill that he has to use a fork and knife....
 
Back
Top