It was my mom who got me into motorcycling.<\/p>\n
Yeah, that surprised me too. I had been pleading for a minibike for some two years \u2014 an eternity to a 13-year-old with ADD \u2014 with all the resolve, like any 13-year-old chasing their dream, of a Trudeau seeking re-election. It didn\u2019t look to be going very well. My father hated motorcycles \u2013 absolutely hated \u2019em \u2013 refusing to even acknowledge my plaintive \u201cI wanna minibike.\u201d My mother… well, like all mothers of a now long bygone era, just said, \u201cGo ask your father.\u201d In other words, I wasn\u2019t getting a minibike.<\/p>\n
Until, well, I did. I remember it well. Somehow the bike had been wheeled into the downstairs living room and put near \u2013 not under; it was a small house \u2013 the Christmas tree. I knew what it was right away, given its little 10-inch wheels sticking out beneath reindeer wrapping and its high mount \u201cscrambler\u201d exhaust clearly visible under Christmas decorations. It was a Candy Gold CT70 \u2013 Honda\u2019s, and therefore the industry\u2019s \u2013 predominant minibike. Seventy-two cubic centimetres of salvation and skinned knees.<\/p>\n
It was quickly apparent who was to thank for this sudden blessing. My dad made it very clear, as I began the bike\u2019s undressing, that his optic nerves were offended by the mere appearance of a motorized two-wheeler. Or as he put it, in a tone that usually preceded corporal punishment: \u201cI don\u2019t want to ever see that friggin\u2019 thing!\u201d<\/p>\n
Nor, if you knew my father \u2013 imagine Sgt. Rock, only with general\u2019s bars on a faux military jacket \u2013 this was far from just a figure of speech. He really didn\u2019t want to lay eyes on it. So, as soon as it was unwrapped, Mom and I squeezed it into the understairs cubby that normally held our firewood and covered it with enough blankets that not only was it hidden from \u201cprying\u201d eyes, its general shape was indistinguishable from, well, a pile of firewood. He really did hate motorcycles that much.<\/p>\n
No surprise then that when I came to actually ride the blessed apparition \u2013 \u201cI wanna motorcycle\u201d having now, of course, been replaced with \u201cI wanna ride my motorcycle\u201d \u2013Mom was the one who expedited the process. Quite how the two of us loaded 72 kilograms of Honda freedom machine into the trunk of a 1964 Chevy Biscayne \u2013 I don\u2019t know how Mom managed to wheedle $350 out of Dad\u2019s pocket for the Trail 70, but sure as shootin\u2019 we weren\u2019t getting a bike trailer \u2013 but come mid-February, I was riding through the snowdrifts of nearby Lac Daigle.<\/p>\n
My mother was part of pretty much every major motorcycle event in my early biking life. When, at 15, I decided that I was going to become a motorcycle journalist \u2013 of which there were about three at the time in all of Canada \u2013 it was she who admonished me to get an engineering degree first\u2026 \u201cjust in case.\u201d That bachelor of mechanical engineering got me my first job at Cycle Canada because they needed a technical editor.<\/p>\n
Mom didn\u2019t bat an eyelash when halfway through that third year I \u201ctook a year off to find myself\u201d \u2013 which is bike-speak for saving enough money to buy a 1978 Suzuki GS1000. Three years later, she fronted me \u201cfirst and last\u201d so that I could ride that same GS to Toronto to take that aforementioned Cycle Canada job. And four months after that, she saved said newfound dream job by lending me enough money for the industry\u2019s first word-processing computer \u2013 Radio Shack\u2019s \u201cTrash 80\u201d TRS-80 \u2013 when it became painfully obvious that engineering school wasn\u2019t much preparation for being able to type 80 words a minute without spelling errors. Like I said, Mom was there the whole way.<\/p>\n
Until \u2013 I\u2019m guessing, by now, you all know where this is going \u2013 just recently. Norma Patricia Jeanne Booth n\u00e9e O\u2019Brien passed away this past January 19th. She was 86 years old.<\/p>\n
My mother was the bedrock of our family, the accountant, the peacekeeper and, occasionally, when either my father or I were out of line \u2013 think: apples falling from trees here for how tense that relationship could get \u2013 a damned strict boss. She was loved beyond measure \u2013 in her last eight years in a nursing home, she never went a single day without someone visiting \u2013 she was respected in her work, welcomed in all the social arenas she chose to join and both travelled and lived beyond her humble beginnings. However, more satisfying to her, I suspect, was that she also saw her children \u2013 let\u2019s pretend there has been some measure of success on these pages \u2013 reach even further. She was \u2013 not a single word of exaggeration \u2013 the reason I have been lucky enough to call myself a motojournalist these past 35 years.<\/p>\n
And, as far as I know, she never ever once sat on a motorcycle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was my mom who got me into motorcycling. Yeah, that surprised me too. I had been pleading for a minibike for some two years \u2014 an eternity to a 13-year-old with ADD \u2014 with all the resolve, like any 13-year-old chasing their dream, of a Trudeau seeking re-election. It didn\u2019t look to be going […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49613,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1873,1876],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n