The Best Part of My Day . . .

There is a certain amount of responsibility that comes with riding a motorcycle and, no, I don’t mean simply wearing a helmet and being hyper-aware at intersections. It goes deeper than that – or perhaps it goes wider, I’m not sure of the steps one takes in these philosophical waltzes . . .

The best part of my day comes at its working end, when I pull out of the parking lot of my own school and ride to my youngest son’s elementary school to pick him up and take him home. Whatever may have happened previous to that moment blows away in the wind as I ride away.

Consider the scene as I pull up to the elementary school: long lines of children pouring relentlessly out the doors while teachers and school staff ride herd on them, moving them along, guiding them to the proper buses. I roll along in the opposite direction of mothers in cars, giving me free rein to rumble my engines and cruise down the lane, hooking left into the forbidden parking lot where I have an assured parking spot in front of the dumpsters because motorcycles can, essentially, make their own parking spot.

I am a man who currently stands within rock-throwing distance of hitting fifty years old. My last fist fight was decades ago, right about the time I was sexually viable to the opposite sex, but none of that matters if you arrive somewhere on the motorcycle. People look at your differently. Black guys – the touchstone of male star power in this culture – give you the quick nod of recognition when you pull up somewhere and idle, even with your helmet off and your thin hair pressed to your skull from the contours of the helmet itself.

When children see you pull up in that fashion they put on the brakes and sag backwards, away from the hand of the adult who is moving them along. They look at you the way they would a robot or a professional athlete or an alien. Their eyes become large and their feet slow down.

This is where you owe them something – perhaps a quick couple of bursts of throttle while you’re idling so your engine roars. Maybe you haven’t parked yet – it’s your responsibility to make a wide, low-leaning half circle into your parking spot. Now you can throttle a couple of times, as if that’s absolutely necessary before parking. Pull your helmet off, run your free hand through your hair, and adjust your sunglasses – all done while still in the saddle. Finally, you make eye contact with the child, who is still reluctantly walking away, pulling back against the adult’s hand so he can take in this spectacle of an Olympian come down to earth. You give him a curt but friendly nod and he gets a hitch to his step and suddenly trots up to the hip of his adult handler, pointing back at you and sharing the news of your glory . . .

Generally I get to the school before the buses have all loaded and the kids have gotten used to seeing me standing out front, waiting for the flood of kids to abate so I can walk indoors. You can’t fight your way upstream against that tide. One time I made the mistake of sitting on one of the park benches beneath the portico. A tiny Hmong child no bigger than a hand puppet stood in front of me and gave me the eye. “I sit there,” he said. I apologized profusely and stood up and he took my place, his backpack between his dangling feet, his expression completely elsewhere.

Some of these kids know me through soccer and I give them a high-five as they troop past to their assigned buses, all of which are named after animals – an innovation this year. In the past kids had to remember their bus route numbers, all of which were complex and difficult.

Many kids don’t know me at all except as that guy who rides up on a motorcycle – or maybe they don’t even know that about me. It doesn’t matter – there is something in the sweetness of a child’s soul that tells them they should wave at me and smile, and they do. It always catches me off guard, but it affects me nonetheless.

My wife works at this school and there’s one particular young lady who is, herself, within rock-throwing distance of becoming a young lady. She’s a year or two away from wearing makeup but she already carries a purse as a necessity and not an affectation. She always gives me a knowing smile and then chides me: “You’re late! Your wife is waiting for you . . .”

And suddenly, just like that, the tide runs out and the halls are empty, or mostly empty and I can make my way down towards my wife’s classroom where my youngest son waits for me in his mother’s classroom

Now the protocol is reversed. When Will and I come out to the bike, if there are kids lingering around, or waiting for their buses to pull out, it is imperative that I throw my leg over the low saddle of the bike and pull my helmet on like a warrior suiting up for battle. The bike is cranked and I rev that engine vigorously, for effect. When Will and I are helmeted and ready, we have become transformed from mortals to riders, our faces and humanity obscured by helmets and tinted shades. Now I pull out slowly but implacably and reverse my half-circle as I navigate through the spaces between the idling buses. You can see the kids pressing their faces to the windows and waving – the ones who know Will call out his name and point and Will, well practiced at this, gives a lazy celebrity’s wave in response (though he’s aware of the impact he makes – often he wants me to take routes that are directly observable by his peers).

There’s no one to see us any more as we ride down the country lanes that circumvent school bus and mom-van traffic, but the vibe is different now. Now that you’re out of the range of diesel smoke from the buses you can smell the sweetness of the country air, that spice of autumn that rides the currents like something imported from some exotic locale. Farmland rolls away to either side, as lovely as anything I’ve seen anywhere in any country I’ve travelled to: rich and green and crisp in the October light, with livestock moving at livestock speed to graze. When your foodstuff can’t run away and lies in abundance as far as your eye can see, your concept of speed and time must be altered.

We wind around and past the farms with their cattle and goats and – in one case – herds of llamas. The trees are gorgeous with autumn colors and the air feels cleaner than that thick and muggy stuff we struggle with during Southern summers, when riding is less pleasant. Now the air carries hints of woodsmoke incense. We rumble past old homes set off the road and obscured by trees and we speculate about the abandoned homes that are slowly but relentlessly being devoured by the jungle.

There is one house in particular that we love to ride past – this one is on a narrow lane that goes through intown neighborhoods, not far from our own intown home. The architecture is typical Small Town Suburban but the garden off to the side boasts strange, exotic plants, arranged in a way that tells the careful observer that these are immigrants from a strange land and, indeed, as Will and I slow down to rumble past we usually see them on a warm afternoon dozing on a platform they have built next to their house, covered from the sun by a roof, their shoes lined up neatly in front. They may live and pay taxes in this small Southern town but they dwell far away, on the side of some mountain in Southeast Asia and when they recline on their sleeping platform they must dream of that faroff homeland . . .