One Less Thing on My Bucket List

Ah, the "Bucket List," the list of things you want to do before you "kick the bucket." The list was around long before the movie of the same name came out, people just called it something else; mine was always "Things I Want To Do Before I Die." "Bucket List" got popular because it sounds, well, a little less drastic, and I'm okay with that.

I was fortunate enough this past week to cross off the #1 thing on my "Bucket List," that being to ride with my son. I didn't get to ride quite as much as I wanted to or as much as we had both planned, thanks to the flight schedule of the Air Mobility Command, but we did get to ride and that's the point.

A little history: I've always had motorcycles throughout my life, but my son was never old enough to have a driver's license much less a bike when I had one. When he did get old enough to have a driver's license I was busy raising him and his sisters, and a motorcycle just wasn't in the cards at that point in time. Of course, as fate would have it we both got bikes after he had grown up, married, joined the Air Force and moved away (not necessarily in that order). He was stationed in Texas when he finally got his first bike, a Harlye-Davidson 883 Sportster, which he quickly traded up for a 2002 Softail Deuce. In the mean time I was living halfway across the nation in New Jersey, and had three bikes while I was there. I got my Harley, a 2003 100th Anniversary Edition Heritage Softail Classic, in February of 2003, and shortly after that my son, "Sparky" as we call him, got his Sportster. So now we both have bikes, we both want to ride together, but we're literally 1500 miles apart. We both knew that sooner or later fate would conspire to let us ride together, but it would be a long time coming.

Like, about 10 years or so.

In the mean time my son gets stationed in Germany and I relocate to South Carolina, and because the TMO office in Texas screwed up he had to leave his Deuce behind with a friend in Texas. So what does he do? Well, he goes out and buys himself a Road Glide while he's in Germany! Gotta have something to ride, after all, and why pass up a chance to bike through Europe?

So this past April he takes leave to come back to the States for the first time in three years to go down to Texas and ride with a group of friends he has down there that call themselves "Cloud Riders." A great group of folks, if I do say so myself. I seriously looked at riding my Nightster down to Texas to ride with him and the other Cloud Riders, but fate stepped in again and screwed that up for me. So Sparky takes leave, flies in to Texas, and goes on the ride with his friends. Then, having done that, he gets on his Deuce and rides from Texas to North Carolina via Virginia, a road trip that is a biker's dream!

Of course you see the opportunity here, as we both did. His mom lives in North Carolina as does his sister, both of my sisters and my parents, and they don't live all that far apart. So we quickly conspire to meet up at my parent's house in North Carolina and then the three of us - Sparky, my sister Dorothy who also has a Sportster, and me can go ride. Sounds like a plan, right?

Everything works out great, even though my son, who just drove from Texas to North Carolina without benefit of a road map and didn't have ANY trouble, gets lost in my parent's town. No sweat, me and my sister just jumped on the bikes and went and got him to lead him to the house.

I don't need to say that the reunion between me and my son, after an absence of three years, was an emotional one. I'm not ashamed to hug another man in public, especially if he's my son, and I proved it then. So then we led him off to my parent's house with my sister in the lead, then him, and me flying tail gunner. The sight of the two of them ahead of me on their bikes was one I'd dreamed of for years, and my sister later said that it was "so great" to be able to look in her rear view mirror and see both Raymonds riding behind her!

I share the sentiment, believe me.

This was on Saturday and we had planned on riding some on Sunday, but the weather and other plans got in the way. The long ride for the three of us will just have to wait until next year when Sparky comes home for good. But in the mean time the rest of the plans was for he and I to putz around town on Monday, road trip down to my house in South Carolina on Tuesday, ride around Lake Murray on Wednesday, and then take him to Charleston AFB on Thursday to catch a hop back to Germany. Monday went off as planned, and we had a great time riding around Raleigh and going to see the house where I lived for the last three years of high school and came back to for the first three years of my military service. Had a simply great time all the way around!

Then Tuesday we saddled up and hit the road for South Carolina. I gotta tell ya, it's a 4 hour trip that is usually long and boring after you've made it as many times as I have, but this trip with Sparky in my rear view mirror went by in a flash! Before I knew it we were at my house, pulling the bikes up into the garage where his Deuce would be spending the next year until he gets back to claim it again. The ride down was just fabulous, a dream come true, and thinking back on it still makes me smile.

One less thing on my "Bucket List."

Then Fate stepped in again and screwed things up, courtesy of Air Mobility Command. Charleston had NO flights out of there to Germany for at least 72 hours, and since Sparky absolutely had to be back in Germany by Friday he put Plan B into operation. He caught a civilian flight up to Baltimore, then rented a car and drove to Dover AFB and caught a flight out of there; only bad thing was he had to leave on Wednesday.

So much for riding around Lake Murray. Dammit all, anyway.

Well, if it's one thing life has taught me is that you have to be grateful for the things you have, and I am most certainly grateful for having had the chance to ride with my son even for the short amount of time we did actually ride. And it makes me look forward to the time we can ride again even that much more.

It's just gonna be hard to wait for a whole year, ya know?

IHC