For some reason I’ve been thinking about motorcycles lately.

My father always had a motorcycle, there’s even a picture of me when I was little on one of his cycles. He also went through a biker phase that morphed into a different style of biking but technically never ended and we had at least two motorcycles at our house. He had a dirt bike and cruiser (complete with fairing and detachable saddle bags) and one of my favorite moments was riding on the Kawasaki (probably a Kawasaki) with him to Denver where I got my allergy tests to eventually be mostly cured of my allergies.

Despite this, I only drove a motorcycle once. Dad, out of the blue (i.e. for reasons I don’t remember) taught me how to ride. (We were in our house which means it had to be in the early 80s which meant I was at least 14 or 15). After I mastered the “down one up whatever” shifting nonsense on the dirt bike (a Honda I think), I rode down a dirt road near our house and actually had a great time. (I didn’t ride enough to get confident/stupid.)

After I returned to our house I got off the bike and never drove a bike again.

Although that was a great moment, I never had the desire to drive a motorcycle again. Maybe if I’d driven one earlier things might have been different, but at university one of my friends had a nasty motorcycle accident that put his leg in a cage and that pretty much eliminated any interest I had in driving a motorcycle. Another friend recently pointed out, whilst questioning why anyone would want to ride a motorcycle, that every motorcycle rider he knew had an “accident story.”

That pretty much explains why I’ll probably never own a motorcycle.