And It’s Suddenly Summer
Today is Easter Sunday and it has been a cloudless day with constant sunshine and a high of about 71 degrees. During my three years on this hilltop, that sort of profile of a day’s weather would have sounded cool rather than warm. But after the last three months, today felt like a warm summer day, and that seemed appropriate for Easter Sunday. After everyone had their brunch and left for their drives home, Kim and I sat in the sunshine on the bench I have placed at the top of the driveway. We call it our “Goodbye Bench” because when we are waving to our guests as they depart, we like to sit there with Kim holding Betty and wave goodbye to our friends and family as they set off on their way to wherever they are headed next. It always feels like a poignant reminder to us about the best and the worst thing about the life of aging human beings. The best and simplest thing is that we get to sit in the sun whenever we want and just have a relaxing moment of endless summer (without the surfboards) as we wander back into our calm and pleasant existence on this hilltop. The worst thing is that life is always about saying goodbye and there are more goodbyes at this stage of life than there are hellos. We have tried to call the bench our “Hello and Goodbye Bench”, but we only rarely use it as a waiting spot for arrivals. The truth is that we don’t usually get to decide when arrivals happen in life, they just do, and we are pleasantly surprised. But goodbyes happen less casually and there is a solemnity to the process that makes it at best bittersweet.
When I think about summer, I think about riding motorcycles through the hills and valleys of Italy. During high school, I never once had a summer job. I had summer jobs in Maine in junior high school. I had summer jobs in college every year. But the institution of summer jobs did not really exist in Italy. Jobs were too scarce and either I didn’t know where and how to find them or they were taken up permanently by young drop-outs who needed to work for their daily bread. So, what is an expat American to do during summer vacation in Italy? He rides his motorcycle wherever he can go within a few days of range from home, based on whatever gas coupons he can scrounge from his mother’s UN rations. Summer to me is about hitting the road, and after almost twenty or so years of post-graduate adulthood (including career, marriage, mortgage and a few kids), when I wanted an escape, it was on a motorcycle and mostly out in the western wide-open spaces of Utah (where I kept a home with a touring motorcycle in the garage on a trickle charger). That was thirty years ago and I used the excuse of riding to Las Vegas from Park City to see my mother, who was in her early seventies…not so very much older than I am now.
Motorcycle riders tend to avoid “the slab” as we call it and prefer to ride the smaller and more interesting and scenic side roads, so I wound my way south through the Canyonlands of Utah. It was my first time seeing places like Moab, Glen Canyon, Bryce, Capital Reefs, Cedar breaks and Zion. It was a spiritual moment in my life. Maybe it was my first midlife epiphany. I have often said that riding through the canyons is my version of going to church. There are few temples I revere more than Zion, and whenever I go through it, I feel the spirituality of whatever I can most relate to a higher presence in my midst.
I was so taken by the ride and the experience that I wanted to share it with others and started talking it up amongst my limited coterie of fellow motorcycle riders. I had met a guy named Frank at a Cornell gathering and he seemed like a candidate because he was a similarly free spirit, but he had other complicating events on his agenda, mostly that his wife (who was also a rider) was not available that year. Then I found a rather pent-up attorney who’s high-powered banker wife was busier than he was and he jumped on the opportunity for a western sojourn. He and I spent a week riding through Southern Utah and refining my knowledge of those roads and wonderful canyons. The ride so moved me and the need in my soul was apparently so deep for this communion with the universe that I revisited the idea of a similar ride with the same Frank from Cornell at the next semiannual gathering in Ithaca. In life, our playmates are often defined by those who can come out to play when we ask. Frank was between CEO gigs and was available to join me for another summer ride through the canyons. Gatherings are momentum-driven and with the critical mass of two, I was able to cajole a colleague who also had a high-powered wife (this time a financial anchorwoman on TV) and another colleague who had been my boss once and who was preparing for retirement by adding activities like motorcycle touring to his repertoire. He invited his neighbor, who was a retired advertising executive (we called him Mr. Plop-Plop-Fizz-Fizz) and we suddenly had a gang of five riders. This all happened at a time when Baby Boomers were all looking for meaning in life and motorcycling was part of that solution for many.
Thus was formed a new beast which we put a name to later in the year when we gathered for yet another ride, this time in New England. The list of members grew and we actually had a set incorporation year from which to begin to demarcate our existence. I am not sure what compels people to need to say that they have been in business or existed since 1996, but it was probably for us a matter of wanting to create in our minds a sense of permanence to the feelings of freedom that riding through the canyons entailed. Institutionalizing freedom is a hard thing to do and falls into that Sound of Music fallacy of trying to “catch a moonbeam in your hand.”
Pages on the calendar always start to fly off at this point in any such story, and the membership of the group morphed over time as these things do. One ride begat another ride and traditions and logos and websites came and went with a group culture formed loosely around some guiding and purposefully humorous ideals and several characters in the roster. There was the Chairman, the Living Legend, the Lieutenant Commander, the itinerant CEO and his own Martha Stewart and me, the RideMaster. We all wandered through our various stages of life with this wonderful and fulfilling addition of a group which was easy-going and low-maintenance. Like all groups, leadership was needed, but it was a light touch form of leadership that suited the libertarian and yet diverse nature of the membership.
But all things age and even organizations and groups have their lifecycles. Their leaders grow a woody bark on their skin. We hit our Silver Anniversary of 25 years just as COVID ravaged the world. Dan Fogelberg has a song called The Leader of the Band and he talks about how “The leader of the band is tired and his eyes are growing old” and if you ignore the religious overtones, you have the definition of aging-out that we all encounter sooner or later. Well, my eyes were growing old but for some reason, putting down the mantle of eternal youth was harder than I imagined. I needed to find and sit on my “Goodbye Bench”, but it was nowhere in sight.
This weekend I was forced to pull the plug on a planned motorcycle ride to Spain and Morocco in the fall. The trip died for the lack of a leader as a result, though that was not my intent. And now I find myself sitting on my bench at the top of my driveway with Kim and Betty next to me, but still, all alone in another sense. It could be an ending if I let it be, but I prefer to think of the sun shining on my face and think that, in reality, it’s suddenly summer again. And the great thing we all know about summer, is that at some point it becomes endless.