Motorcycle mishap -

I’m no Don Juan or ladies man by any stretch of the imagination – as a matter of fact I was just the opposite. No I’m not that ugly and I think I have a great personality. I usually impressed little children and old ladies. On more than one occasion we would go to a girls house with a number of friends, then after we left the mother would tell the girl we visited that she really thought I was great – but the girl always liked one of my friends. This would eventually get back to me from the lucky friend, as it were told by their new girl friend. I never could figure out what benefit this information was to me – that an lady old enough to be my mother thought I was great - but the cute young ones just wanted to be friends.

For this reason and the fact I was shy and had no nerve to ask them out, I've only had one girl friend my whole life – now after twenty-five years of marriage she still hasn’t left me. Most people didn’t think I was shy, I defiantly wasn’t quite. Usually when I get nervous I talked too much (read Super Bowl Bet). I did go on a few dates but not that many. Besides my wife there was only one girl that I took out more than a couple of times. I was still scared of her but for some reason not as much as others. Despite this I never tried to take it to the next level.

The reason it probably never went there was that the times we went out it really didn’t work out that great. Don’t get me wrong, I think we both had a lot of fun but everything else seemed not to work out. There were plenty of signs, it just takes me a little bit to catch on. One time it was her idea for us to take her father’s new pick-up for a drive. Well we ended up in a canyon and the trees got a little too close and scratched it. I got the impression later that it didn’t go over too well – how could it, this loser just scratched her dad’s new truck.

Once we went golfing, not a good idea when the girl is better than you are. As we were walking to the green we saw a few of our other friend on a different fairway. I ran up to get my ball and from out of nowhere this huge dog ran into the back of my legs and knocked me over. This is kind of embarrassing when your trying to impress a young lady – not to mention the other guys that got a kick out of that one.

Once we decided to go on a walk to see where her family was building a new house and while we were walking past one of my friend’s house I noticed that his light was on in his basement window. I knew he was on a date with one of my date’s best friends and I wanted to see if they wanted to go for a walk with us. I convinced her to walk up and see if they were in his room. Well they were, but they were making out on the waterbed. This isn’t a good thing to see when I didn’t even dare hold her hand. I think the next day he got blinds.

Now we didn’t date that much so all of this happened over a short period of time. The worse story took place after I had graduated from high school and I took her to one of my softball games. This is an activity I did quite often with my wife – it’s a cheap date and you get to act all macho on the field while all of the girls sit together comparing recipes or something. It was a little cool that night so she decided to bring a quilt and a jacket, the quilt was made by her grandmother and was a beautiful family heirloom – I had decided to ride my motorcycle as part of the date. I don’t remember if we won or lost - which doesn’t really matter but after the game we decided to go out for a treat. We were riding down fourth north, which happen to be one of the busiest streets in town and has a speed limit of forty miles and hour. Back in those days no one ever wore helmets or even really thought about it. It was starting to get late and the sun was setting because I remember vividly that all of the sudden my bike froze up the front light went off as the engine killed and the back wheel stopped. Now at forty if your back wheel stops the bike needs to stop as well, so we skidded for about twenty to thirty feet before we stopped. This is one of the two times in my life that I realized after that I was lucky that we hadn’t been drastically injured. The way the bike swerved and skidded to a stop we was lucky that we didn’t crash. After we came to a stop I asked her if she was Ok - thankfully she was, then I said I didn’t know what had gone wrong. She responded that she did and that her grandmother’s pieced quilt had been ripped from her hands.

After getting off the bike we could see the quilt wrapped in the greasy chain, my heart sank. It was stuck so tight that we had to use a pocketknife to cut it out. I sure her parents said - now this is the same kid that scratched our truck? We both still live in the same city and run into each other quite often. She married a great guy that happened to be one of my friends – not the one on the waterbed. I’m sure he hasn’t scratched his father-in-laws truck of destroyed many of their quilts – I already took care of that. He was one of the ones at the golf course that saw the dog take me down; after all of these things I’m sure he wasn’t that worried about the competition.