motorcycle monday

If you think a typical evening in the Anderson home involves eating dinner, watching a little TV, and then hitting the hay, you obviously don't know my father (or any of us, for that matter--we're pretty loud). Dad always does things on his own time-table, and even more often he does things out of the blue. He's been known to say things like "I'm leaving for Florida in fifteen minutes if you want to come," or to ask "What do you think is down this road?" as he's turning onto an old dirt road very much like the one that Belle's dad and the wary Phillippe take in Beauty and the Beast.

So, yesterday my dad decides to buy a motorcycle. It's random, and kind of out of nowhere, but not really surprising. It doesn't run. Not surprising at all.

It's also not surprising when Dad calls at 10:30 at night and asks me to come down to the Home Depot parking lot with the towing cable. The truck he rented to get the bike home had to be turned back in to the store by 10:00, and he didn't have time to make it to the house before then. So Dad, Jillian, and the motorcycle are at Home Depot, and I need to bring the towing cable.

Eventually it works out that Dad comes and gets the cable, because I have no idea where it is. Back at the Home Depot, we analyze our options with the mutinous motorcycle. We try to jump it, push it, pull-start it--but nothing works. It's humid and we're sticky and the bike's not budging, and straggling Home Depot workers look at us strangely as they trickle out to their cars. Soon it's 11:30, and we've only managed to move across the parking lot. The bike is heavy, and almost falls on Dad as we're attempting another pulling maneuver, and then it almost falls again when it stubbornly refuses to go up on its kickstand, which turns out to actually be not a kickstand, but a prop used for working on the bike.

I'd like to say that eventually we got it home, and could count the whole enterprise as a success. But it's still in the Home Depot parking lot, and I have a feeling we'll be making another visit after work today, hopefully with better supplies.

As inconvenient as it all is, this is the stuff memories, and life, are made of.

:)