An Expensive Lunch

I had lunch with my wife today and we got swept up into the consumerism thing and an hour later we were out $8215 with the promise of a bottle-green Triumph Bonneville with two miles on the clock to be waiting for us at Pure Triumph Ft Lauderdale this weekend.
I am still in shock.
Now I need to get serious about selling the GTS.

Oh The Humanity

At work last week we had a transformation. The Trainee lost some of his humanity, and it all happened on receipt of one 9-1-1 phone call.

We were sitting around in the Communications center, the four of us, talking of this and that. I think I was reading a book, a travel tale about two men crossing the States on a couple of Heinkel scooters, the others were muttering about fashions or celebrity gossip or TV shows, about all of which i know nothing, so I keep my mouth shut. I have a lot of trouble when I'm training someone to answer the police phones, in holding back and letting the trainee struggle a bit, so in order to give my latest Trainee a bit of room I try to absent myself in a book between calls, and I distance my microphone from my mouth, so he gets to start the calls unobstructed by my voice.

A 9-1-1 line started to ring and the rule is when one of the eight red lines starts to blink and whine drop everything and answer it. The Trainee did just that. Anticipating a false alarm I kept reading but through my headset I heard the unmistakable tones of a true emergency. The caller's voice was off pitch and warbling as though he were struggling to keep control as he told The Trainee that there was a dead man in his neighbor's trailer.

I expected The Trainee to go into his usual freeze mode,unable to type, failing to ask the questions and I scrabbled frantically for my clip board so I could write down the details. However he calmly asked the caller to repeat the address, he entered it and started to type: " caller found white male sitting in chair..." And as the details got grosser, and they got pretty bad as death rarely comes clean and tidy, he kept on typing even as he toned the ambulance and gave them their instructions over the radio.

I knew there really was a dead man out there and The Trainee understood it too. We get lots of panicked calls about possible dead people lying on the sidewalks, but they generally turn out to be drunk and passed out in this party town. We know what questions to ask to get our pulses up when dead people really are dead. The Trainee took the call and dealt with it like a real dispatcher.

He was excited afterwards, focusing on his professional response to a crisis, running through his mind how he had dealt with the call. It took a while for him to remember that someone had died. In a weird way I felt good about it. He is building the carapace he needs to answer the phones, not to freeze up and start trembling.

The next day we got three ambulance calls all together and he dispatched therm by himself, putting each unit on the proper call, making notes in the computer and tidying everything up before he swivelled his chair to face the middle of the room and resume his interrupted conversation without even a reference to the bloody scooterist, tripped cyclist, or elderly woman possibly having a stroke. They were all being taken care of quickly and efficiently and he wanted urgently to know what his colleagues thought of his hair cutting plans.

Clearly he won't be The Trainee for much longer and all he can think about is signing up for overtime.

They never did tell us what the dude died of, but we're dispatchers, so we've long since forgotten the call.

How Not To Sell

What was he thinking? I said to myself as I turned the rental car round and headed for the highway 371 miles back home to my stilt house in the Keys. I couldn't wait to get out of the cookie-cutter, gated community,with golfing privileges, where the BMW was being offered for sale. He was a nice guy, with a dry sense of humor, perhaps someone I couldhang out with by the pool and talk about his interesting life. I could be friends with this man I thought.

The seller said he was an engineer, and clearly he's no salesman. The motorcycle was a fixer upper, which were it listed as such, would be no bad thing, but I couldn't imagine riding it home in the condition it was in. Worse than that, it clearly had never been loved, just used, and never cared for. Shame.

The day started rough with a massive thunderstorm dumping inches of rain on Islamorada, the purple island in Spanish ( pronounced, in English: isle-a-more-ahh-dah, which confuses wanna-be Spanish speakers). I love the rain in hot climates, it gives reason to pause, it cools things off and it rarely descends during the cold time of year when the presence of rain would make cold temperatures just miserable. This rainy season has proved to be old fashioned wet,("In the old days it rained all the time.") inasmuch as it is raining fit to drown our waterlogged peninsula. Water restrictions? We don't need no stinkin' water restrictions! (We do actually, as the mainland aquifer is way down, development continues along with consumption; but you can't sell the need for restrictions to peasants when the skies are flooding the fields).

The Highway became even more tenuous as it disappeared into a wall of water, part of which fell from the skies and part of which was thrown up by our tires and the third part was simply moisture saturation in the atmosphere. Even I was forced to accept that thirty miles an hour was quite fast enough in these conditions. A lot of people drive as though vehicle and tire technology hasn't progressed since the model T Ford, yet they forget to turn on their lights and they decline to pull over and stress themselves out way too much in the rain. Rain persisted on and off throughout my 800-mile day but it never again came down as hard and as long as it did in the Upper Keys. Lovely and spectacular it was.

Eventually I found my to an Orlando suburb, an agglomeration of Runs, Courtes and Shoppes, all winding landscaped streets fronted by 3,000 square foot mansions with pools (water! water!), garages and not a bum in sight or a leaf out of place. I live in the Keys and one gets used to different standards I suppose. The motorcycle was presented for my inspection as though parked a year ago and never cleaned since. It was sun faded, the paint actually photographs well, but when he lived in the Arizona desert years ago he left this poor beast out in the sun. A lot.

Candy apple red has become faded pink on the tank.

I took a test ride and it hesitated, I tweaked the enrichment knob and the cable almost fell out of the socket. There was sooty black residue around the end of the exhaust. The oil radiators had long dead bugs caught in the fins, the engine casing had splotches of oils and grease and yuck spread on it.

"I had new fuel injectors installed," he said. "Not by the BMW shop," I said. He agreed and I knew because in changing them they had spilled yellow fuel over the engine casing and they had failed to balance them at all properly. The engine surged and idled uncertainly.God knows how the motorcycle really handles because the front tire was so badly worn down one side it rode at a permanent lean. To add injury to insult, the bulbous fuel tank squashed my testicles with the seat in the lowest position, the position where my feet reached the ground.

To sell this thing he needs to take a lesson from a realtor: presentation!

I want to be riding again, and I want to write about the joys of the ride, but there it is. My goal is to buy something reliable, long lasting and fun. I can't lose sight of that goal, even as I wither and wonder if there is a real alternative to the Vespa. Like a decent lightly used Bonneville? There had better be, because the GTS has to go, as she-who-must-be-obeyed has made it plain. I sigh and and wonder how will I cope with a real crisis in my life, say a terminal diagnosis, bankruptcy or a satellite crashing in the canal?

Hopping Nostalgia

My wife and I try to take advantage of our layovers when we travel. We have eaten Greek in Detroit and explored snowy Windsor, Ontario, on layovers between California and the Caribbean. Amsterdam is the European hub of Northwest Airlines and that's an opportunity to eat genuine old fashioned Dutch food on a stop there (marrow bone peas anyone? rijstaffel? Yum...), and a few years ago I spent a happy day wandering Nice waiting for my onward flight to Corsica. Layovers can be the most memorable parts of flying.

On our return from the wedding in the snowy fastness of the Sierra Nevada mountains we took our first tour in many years of Alameda, California. Alameda is an island city connected by bridge and tunnel to neighboring Oakland, and for many years was a forgotten suburb, a Navy base with straight, tree lined streets and funky Victorian homes laid out like a stereotypical Mid Western town.

We got to know Alameda because we kept our sailboat in Marina Village and we spent happy weekends sailing the freezing San Francisco Bay. After yet another brisk journey across the Bay, alone or on a club cruise, we would repair to a hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese restaurant and eat pork chops, lemongrass and shredded pork omelette. We were determined to eat at Vo's once more but there was only a hole where Vo's had once stood on Webster Street in Oakland's Chinatown.

Standing on the sidewalk in the last rays of the sun, feeling the cold, fog laden breeze I felt a mixture of sadness and comfort. Its not just Key West that suffers from incessant change and renewal. I doubt I will return to the restaurant that will arise in place of Vo's -"remodeling" the sign in the window promised- but I like to hope other people will make a stop there a routine in their busy lives.

We found a Chinese restaurant packed with Chinese diners and we took our place among them. We skipped the sizzling tripe and white chicken feet, for we are paid-up members of the bourgeoisie, and we took shrimp, ribs and chow mein.

We prefer the Szechuan school of spicy Chinese cooking and this adventure returned mixed results. The ribs were cut the wrong way and the slice of bony beef was covered in brown gravy over white Italianate pasta all too reminiscent of my English boarding school childhood. The shrimp were fried whole and smeared in...mayonnaise? That's what it tasted like, and the chow mein was littered with chunks of scallop too large to fit on the fork and pink pieces of what I suspected after I ate one, were cow hearts. It didn't taste bad but it wobbled horribly and pinkly when I speared it on my fork. One was enough, with my wife protesting "Don't tell me what it is- don't! Please!" as she bravely downed her piece. I remained silent and focused on the mayo.

We took a post prandial walk through the manicured grounds of marina Village, admiring the lawns, the order and the silence. Unlike the Key West Bight,which is always full of people and activity, Marina Village appears to be enforcing the no live aboard rules and of sailors there were none in evidence, just a thousand still and unattended boats, neglected by their owners who were nowhere to be seen on this sunny Sunday evening. The Gemini catamaran on the right looked just like ours all those years ago and it set off all sorts of memories, sitting there waiting for a sail. We sailed ours to Key West and I wanted to jump aboard and do it all again.

We walked and talked and remembered the excitement and fear of preparing to cast off on our epic sail to the Panama Canal at the end of the century. We walked the dogs, we sailed the boat we learned to trust each other. I was sad and I couldn't quite understand why. Nostalgia is all very well, but we are happy in the Keys, we don't miss the cold and the fog and the crowding of California, but a part of me wanted to roll back time and be ten years younger. I wouldn't change a thing but I wanted to re-live those crazy days. I wanted another go round. That's the first time I have felt that unreasoning, unreasonable demand for more time. For a man like me who has tried to live each phase of his life to the fullest, the feeling was unsettling.

The day was drawing to a close, and it was time to head towards the airport. We took a drive through downtown Alameda, a hopping place these days, fully recovered from the abrupt departure of the Navy. There were lots of stores and restaurants, lights, and people. It was charming.

On our way to the Oakland airport across a bridge, nostalgia struck another low blow and we turned into a business park where we used to take our dogs for long aimless walks after they had been cooped up on the boat all day. Debs, our husky, loved this field, it was wide open and filled with tall dry grass in which lived dozens of jackrabbits. I have this abiding memory of him leaping through the grass, ears flying wildly as he sought his prey (which always got away, luckily for my bourgeois sensibilities...). Emma the portly yellow Lab, followed along at a distance, running a bit and coming back to pant at my feet.

The field showed an open window on the Bay and across the grasses years ago we could see the illuminated San Francisco skyline as Debs wore himself out in the chilling Bay breeze. The sun went down in concert with the temperatures as the illuminations went up. It was magic and we never tired of walking the dogs in the jackrabbit field.

On our return last week we found the industrial park paved over, anonymous warehouses and blank faced offices occupying almost all the open space. The central area was bulldozed ready for any new tenant ready to buy the space. I sat in the car bundled up and stared out in the beams of the headlights at what was left of Debs' field. All gone I thought. Nothing stays the same. I'm slipping off into oblivion. The past can't come back. I was feeling nostalgic for my younger self.

We turned the car to leave and find our way in the darkness to the newer, improved and bigger airport. More land built over, more noise, more people, cheaper fares.

"Look! Look!" said my wife. And there on the grassy sidewalk hopped a big eared, gray jack rabbit. He paused, stared at us and loped out of sight into the brush between two office buildings.

"See," my wife said squeezing my hand. "He came to give us a message. They're still here, holding on." Aren't we all...

Broad Horizons

"I've never seen a beach like this!" Diggy's slack-jawed amazement took me aback a bit. He is a lifelong resident of Key West and in all his 24 years he had never seen the endless sands of Fort Lauderdale? It seemed impossible but it is true.

I drove on along the waterfront and Diggy's eyes widened enough to escape their sockets as he observed the broad, clean sidewalk, the perfect palms and the strapping men and women flexing themselves along the waterfront.

Bathing conditions are better than "OK," they are perfect for visitors who actually have their swimsuits along with them...

"Look at those lifeguard huts," Diggy noticed the air conditioned, perfectly painted towers, housing more strapping youths no doubt, sitting ready to run down the ramp. grab the boogie board stuck in the sand, and then into the modest surf to save a life or two before lunch.

"Smathers Beach should look like this," Diggy breathed, imagining a Key West never before seen, bum free, tidy and organized. That's the thing about Key West: newcomers want funk and character, Conchs prefer order, cleanliness and modernity. Its just another paradox. Riding the mainland with Diggy is a healthy reminder of the value of change.

Playing the tourist is a new role for us but we dive in cheerfully, and we decide to take a stroll on the Pompano Beach municipal pier,which charges a fee for entry, a concept unknown on Key West's White Street Pier, and draws comment from my Conch colleague. Something to the effect that an entry fee keeps the rif-raf out.

Furthermore Pompano Beach takes care of its height impaired anglers, and neither of us has seen this neat trick before:

The point of this tour of the mainland was to deliver my still ailing Vespa to the dealer for a fourth attempt at repair. After that we were free to peruse the offerings of machines sold to be ridden. Diggy has moved past the always useful moped and is now riding a reliable Honda cruiser. He feels 750ccs aren't enough and he is seeking, as all good motorcyclists do, a roadgoing expression of his inner self. He's been thinking about an 1100cc V-Star as sold by the Yamaha shop in Key West. I am looking further afield for my riding satisfaction. We started at the Triumph dealer where I tried to introduce Diggy to a Bonneville Cruiser. I like the standard Bonneville, on sale for about $10,000 (deep sucking intake of breath).Diggy sat on the America and judged it unsatisfactory. We wandered into the back and I looked at the classic Ducatis (too tall in the seat) while Diggy proceeded to shock me by mounting a Monster and falling in love. He leaned into the handlebars, tucked his feet up on the standard pegs and decided this was the bike for him.

You can take a Conch to water and be shocked by how rapidly he will leap in and revel in the new, the unfamiliar, the better. I really think Diggy might end up on a Ducati.

Vespa Blues Part Three

I find it odd that I am inching closer and closer to the all American motorcycling ideal that there is "no substitute for cubic inches." I have long held the belief that less is more, and have frequently chosen the simpler path. Every time I came across Yogi Berra's fork in the road I usually declined to pick it up, on the grounds my backpack was already overflowing with junk.

Even on the streets of Rome a 500cc scooter seems the bare minimum to escape the gravitational tug of the traffic circling Piazza di Torre Argentina.

Times change and I suppose that reluctantly so must I. My decision to commute on an engine between 650 and 900ccs is based on the eighty percent rule. Frankly I like speed, and I like commuting during odd hours when the road is clear, but on those days when Highway One is bunged up with traffic I still enjoy the cut and parry of passing. It seems my habits are bad, and they must be punished. No Vespa for me!

I believe the Vespa is entirely capable of maintaining a brisk pace on the road, of passing as I like, of staying healthy for years to come. But I am tired of being a rebel, or riding too many miles, using my two wheeler as real transportation, of enjoying the limitations of CVT transmission, of feeling no fear on "small" wheels.

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So I am toying with my choices to replace my Vespa GTS which is still being tested by Vespa Ft Lauderdale. The Vespa is paid off, I shall sell it at my leisure, but in the meantime I am unsure which exact path to follow. And in an age where "mid sized" is 1300cc, I still propose to increase my cubic capacity in a smaller measure than most riders. I have always found my greatest pleasure in smaller capacities- 350ccs when I was a youth, the splendid kick starting Yamaha SR500 later and a Yamaha 650 Maxim complete with huge fairing and shaft drive when I rode from Florida to California 16 years ago. I remember the dogs of my life, overweight, tall and principally represented by a Honda Goldwing that made me feel inadequate when facing corners together.

My buddy Giovanni loves his elephantine 1200cc BMW and squeezes it through small Italian towns where mopeds sometimes fear to go, even in Spoleto as the small hill town shrinks to accomodate the Two Worlds festival.

I shall restrain my impulse to oversize it, but I shall seek reliability, and as much simplicity as the 21st century offers. I checked my diary entries and I note my Vespa was inoperable almost six weeks ago.That's a long time to be bereft of my favorite past-time, especially for so insignificant a cause. Its time to enjoy life by riding once again. Thus time on some big Hog that will dwarf my puny efforts at daily riding by quarter liter. I hope to be in the saddle next week if all goes well. Risking a ticket perhaps...