killbam.net

I’m still a bit shooken up by the crash and the subsequent interaction with the policeman.  I’m not out of the wood yet, either figuratively or literally.  What if the insurance company demands to see the bike?  How many thousands of dollars am I going to have to pay to fix everything?

The bike’s handlebars are bent so that I have to hold them at an odd angle just to ride straight.  I am more than a bit worried that at any moment the bike will fall apart, that the already cranky CB360 engine will explode and launch the front wheel off leaving me flipping around on the pavement again.

But with only a couple of turns left in the forest, I make the conscious decision to suck it up and ride like I mean it.  If there’s any one thing that caused the crash, and will cause another crash, it’s being scared.

Bicyclists are still running through The Tunnel Of Trees and at a moderately fast pace, I pass a couple as I lead Rob, Jon, my Dad and Jenny through the last few turns.  We come out of the forest and arrive at a big log cabin diner busy with bicyclists and quite a few Harley Davidson riders.  It’s about 1:30pm, and we’re pretty hungry.

I pull off my helmet and try my best to relax.  It feels a bit like I’m walking through a dream, I feel pretty disconnected.

“What, you’ve got a problem?” My dad yells.  I turn around and he’s not looking at me.  He’s still got his helmet on and he’s facing two bicyclists parking the bikes in yellow lycra.

“That pass was too close!  That’s dangerous.” One of them yells back.

“You’re dangerous swerving all over the road.  How about you let us decide what’s too close?” my Dad yells back through his helmet.  It’s a bit muffled, he’s still taking off his gear.

I have no idea what’s going on.  All I think about is that I can’t afford to kick these guys asses because the cop might come back and check my VIN

“We have three feet on either side!”

“So what?”

No, I can’t beat the shit out of them.  I start to calculate how far the cop could be since I last saw him.  How many bicyclists are there?  There’s some Harley guys here too.

“Nothing, it’s not worth it.” Says the bicyclist, as he motions for his friend to go inside the crowded restaurant.

I wasn’t that sure of what was going on before and now I definitely don’t know.

“What was that about?” I ask Jon.

“You made a close pass,” he replies.
“And one of the biker’s moved over and tried to block the rest of us.” My dad adds.

Did I? Did he? I’m not sure. There was probably some asshole biker that I had to pass on the outside. I think I remember some of them hogging the whole road. I think.

I can’t really think.

“We could have taken them.” Says Rob.

Yea, he’s right I think, as we follow them into the restaurant.

I came home today and the entire house reeked mildly of skunk.

Ostensibly a skunk, or some angry skunk ghost spirit, got into the house two days ago while I was spending the weekend at Wai’s.  The increasingly intense smell which my Dad described as “burnt rubber” prompted him to go on an in house skunk hunting adventure in the middle of the night.

After finding nothing, the next day him and Jon tore up the basement trying to figure out where the skunk actually was.  His plan was to air out the house, and then locate the skunk based on the leftover smell.  I wasn’t here for this, but as I was being told this story I was hoping with all my heart that they found the skunk and it sprayed one of them in the face and attacked the other.

But they didn’t find it, and after some cursory internet searching my Dad learned that skunks are nocturnal.  So at 5 past the witching hour that night he went outside in his robe, with a brick, and a flashlight.  I guess he had the brick just to plug up the skunk’s burrow, but I’m sure he would have chucked the brick or at least postured with it as a weapon if he saw the skunk.

Anyway, he found a burrow under our front stairs, but instead of a skunk there was a possum, which did what possums do… and just stared at him.  He stared back, and after about a minute of the two staring at each other my Dad went back into the house to do more research on the internet about possums.

Wikipedia says they’re pretty harmless, and he guesses that the possum got sprayed by the skunk and stunk up our house by proximity.  They don’t fight cats or dogs or eat wood or anything.

So now we have a new pet possum who lives by our front doorsteps.

The oldest, and most telegraphed of the three passings this year was my Grandma’s.  We’ve known for about a year or two that she was suffering from cancer, and her condition had notibly deterorated from about spring onward.

Grandma was adventerous, often worried about us kids, and religious.  We had been making the most of her time left, planning a slew of family reunions and bringing in relatives from California and Hawaii, but only my younger sister saw Grandma in her final bed ridden days.  Still, she had copious amounts of cheer.  A devout Christian Scientist she accepted and wasn’t afraid.

She passed away at the end of summer, with her two sisters by her side.

At her house in California, we held a non-traditional funeral with music and food stations spread throughout the pool deck area and the living room, per her request.  It was like a get together, and a surprising amount of people came, invalidating my theory that the older you get the more you lose contact with people.  Some people came to honor my Grandpa, who passed away when I was a kid.

Grandma’s death fell upon me numbingly.  During one point in her life, she moved to Clarendon Hills to try to connect with us grandkids, but it was largely a failed attempt.  The generation gap was just too large, and although I now appreciate her attempts to culture us, at the time it was just a bother.

We thought she was a bit too uptight, along with the rest of our religious relatives.  While preparing for the funeral, my extended family further treated us like children, which only served to divorce me from any pain of her passing.  Jon felt the same way, but spoke the truth when he said, “At the very least, she’s responsible for our being.  We owe her for that.”

This left my dad as the de facto head of the Kimball family now, as the oldest male.  Living in Chicago, he wasn’t able to be with her at the end, and he spent his time working on the CB360T engine in the garage.  When he got the call that Grandma had passed, he was cleaning out carburetors.

Grandma’s death illustrated to me a lesson in aging and respecting the elderly.  At the get together, the slideshow showed she was a beauty queen as a young adult.  The remarkable American beauty was nothing like church going senior citizen I knew.  It’s sometimes hard to believe that every geriatric walker using pensioner was once a rebelious 20 something with dreams and a probable disrespect for authority.

I just wish I got to know that side of her better.