Motorcycles and Freedom

My father has three brothers. Had. His youngest, my Uncle Michael, was killed about 17 years ago. He was 33.

I work as a policy analyst for a State agency. For four months every year, a big portion of my job is reviewing proposals for new laws, made by the legislature while they are in session. So every time some elected official starts humming, “I am a Bill, I am only a Bill…” and submits something in a committee, dozens, sometimes hundreds, of staffers like me have to read it. We forecast the effect, if any, the changes proposed by the law-to-be would have on how our agency functions. Most of the proposals have no affect whatsoever.

But I am amused, every year, to consider the blizzard of effort that must be expended on every. Single. One. Of these proposals. First, an email is sent to me, and all of the people in positions like mine in all of the departments in my agency, that lists all of the proposals made thus far. The legislative services staff for my agency tries to flag those proposals that would be of particular concern to each department, and solicits our attention as to the proposal’s impact.

So, last year, when a Delegate (or one of his constituents) was offended by the rubber testicles someone suspended from the back of a pick-up truck, he proposed a law that would prohibit the display of anatomically correct body parts. Seriously. And we had to read it and comment on how expensive it would be to enforce. 2007 HB 1163. Go look it up.

Anyway, a few times during the legislative session, all of the staff legislative analysts meet together and spend as long as it takes (these are called “marathon sessions” for a reason) to go through every last bill, making sure the Legislative Services office knows which bills concern us. If there ARE issues of note, (whether the issues lead us to recommend support or), someone is directed to draft a position paper, summarizing the Agency’s or Department’s concerns and interests. If the issues addressed are substantial enough, someone will be tasked with monitoring the bill’s progress, and personally appearing at any hearings where it is discussed, to testify in favor or against it.

There is one this year that reduces the requirement that all motorcyclists wear helmets. It would allow those motorcyclists who have remained accident-free for a set number of years, to not wear helmets anymore. Being allowed to (or being barred from) ride helmet-free is a great big huge deal to motorcyclists. Bikers in Maryland are all required to wear helmets since the first of October, 1991. It is unfortunate that I know that date.

Anyway, so maybe that’s pretty friendly, you know, to let the safe bikers have the option? The fact that they’ve never wrecked, might mean there’s a better chance they won’t wreck in the future. But public safety policy aside, it’s grossly impractical; how is a police officer supposed to tell by looking at a motorcyclist whether or a not a helmetless rider meets the standard? We get a lot of laws like that, proposing some relief or change that might sound attractive (even if sometimes it only sounds good to single legislator, or a legislator’s single constituent), but would be either impossible or horrendously expensive to implement.

So, back to the marathon; the motorcycle helmet law provoked some jokes.

We should amend the proposal, so that if a motorcyclist gets killed without a helmet, they are automatically an organ donor. See, that’s funny, because when someone gets killed on a motorcycle without wearing a helmet, you know, it’s usually from the head trauma, so there are lots of perfectly good organs left over. So yeah, motorcyclists are just donors-on-wheels, right?

There are profound experiences that come to us over and over. We fall in love with our spouse again, mourn the loss of a parent again, cry at someone’s graveside long after, even decades after their funeral. Every time I hug one of my kids, I feel the kinesthetic echo of when the nurse first handed me the infant, wrapped in a hospital blanket, years and years ago. Strong emotional experiences ripple out over time caressing us over and over again with their brushing-by. Like a rock dropped in a calm lake, the waves move away, bounce, return, creating patterns of interference and reinforcement.

When the motorcycle helmet joke was uttered, I remembered everything that ever happened with my Uncle Mike, concentrated and flashing by in heartbeat.

He was . . . I don’t know, I guess maybe the black sheep. He seemed kind of a free spirit, kind of a ne’er-do-well.

He was not many years older than me, closer as a peer than distant as an adult. So I never had a clear perspective of how self-destructive his behavior was. His nonchalance looked cool to me. But admittedly, I couldn’t conceive its consequence, how his marriage failed, his life faltered, stalled. When I was in High School, he worked, sort of, as a contractor for the cable company. I know at some point before that he had been in the army (I got his hand-me-down olive army jacket, which I wore when I walked our dog).

I remember his being AWOL for a while when I was much younger. He left Fort Carson, Colorado, and basically vanished. His car was found a few weeks after he disappeared, out in the desert of New Mexico, all shot up. There were whispers of a drug deal maybe going bad, him being on the lam perhaps. He re-surfaced months later, on the other side of the country, working a shrimp boat in New Orleans. Now I chuckle, imagining him swinging shrimp nets for the Bubba Gump Company.

Uncle Mike always seemed to be just a few steps away from having some kind of exotic adventure. But he never seemed to move much, never took those steps. A lifetime of potential energy. A match never struck, never lit.

He drifted in and out. Was in some family photos, and not others. He was mythic to me. Seemed taller than everyone else. Not around enough to become any kind of a hero-figure, but around. When I was a teenager, old enough to drive by myself, I bumped into him one time at a 7-11, him leaving as I arrived. He was driving some kind of souped-up muscle car I hadn’t seen him in before. Knowing that he didn’t live the lifestyle of the idle rich (a car like that had to be worked on for years, or bought outright; Mike didn’t do long-term souping-up of things, and he couldn’t afford to be buying such indulgences), I asked my Dad what had happened. Apparently, Uncle Mike got hit by a car while riding his motorcycle (breaking his wrists. Plural), an injury case Dad helped settle. Mike blew the settlement buying a street rod. Cool. Not responsible, like I’ve said, but cool. You’d think having experienced such a wreck once, he’d have learned. But it was hallmark of Uncle Mike’s life; learning from experience seemed to be something he never quite got the hang of.

He very obviously was comfortable with his recreational drug use. I remember a t-shirt he had with an enormous graphic on the front with a prescription for Quaaludes on it; I asked my Mom how to pronounce it.

Heh, Mom is so imperturbable. “Quay-loods.” Even said matter-of-factly, it still amuses me to remember her answering that question.

Uncle Michael was killed after being hit while riding his motorcycle helmetless, when a car turned left in front of him. He went through the car’s windshield, suffering a basal skull fracture, and not much else by way of hurt. Maryland had just that year passed a law requiring motorcyclists to wear helmets, but it didn’t go into effect until a few months after Mike’s wreck. He apparently looked just fine; it must have been awful to have him so young, so terminally hurt, and still appearing to be so ready to roll out of bed, ready for the next thing.

But that kind of injury, he was dead, it was just a matter of how soon. He was without a spouse, so his brother, my Father, acted as his guardian, making the decision to turn off the machines and allow his organs to go to donors. His liver had to go to someone who had Hepatitis–C (this diagnosis is another piece in the mountain of evidence that he hadn’t really spent his life very responsibly). He was one of the first donors to have a Hep-positive organ donated that way, it was a new program in 1991.

I remember playing pool with him at a family dinner. He was so tall, and I wanted him to think I was cool. I was mean to my sister, goaded by my desire to seem tough. Something I am sorry about now.

I remember going to his wedding. Actually, I’ve seen the pictures, so maybe I am just remembering the pictures. He had his dress army uniform on. My Dad had the most excellent moustache, I was wearing a dark blue suit and a spectacle of an orange and blue shirt. I’ll bet it was polyester...

Mike’s marriage didn’t last. He had one daughter, and his ex-wife left for California, taking Audrey with her.

When Mike died, I was young, married with small children, debts, going to school thousands of miles away. I couldn’t afford to come back home to the funeral. I should have made the effort anyway. Mike lived his life with so little affixing him to other people, to places. That’s what it means to be responsible, doesn’t it? To do things anticipating the consequence, the permanent effects? I look back at Mike, and it seems so obvious to me now that nothing he did was ever calculated to be lasting; he just did whatever he felt like doing next.

>whoosh< It all went through my head with the wise-crack about helmetless motorcyclists.

He was 33 when he died, a few weeks shy of his 34th birthday. That’s eight years younger than I am now. He was ten years older than me, but that was 17 years ago; I have lapped him, out-lived him and then some. How have I done with my years of advantage?

Now I am a Dad, an Uncle myself. It delights me to think that my kids have their own Uncle Michael (a fact that makes my youngest son wrinkle his brow in thought, and then laugh).

The bill I told you about, the helmet one? It never made it out of committee. The MVA has a strong fiscal argument based the impracticality of enforcement. But MVA is keeping that paper, for the next time another brilliant legislator decides to propose it again.

It occurs to me, thinking about Mike, that we learn things in one of two ways. We certainly learn by direct experience. Experience is, as they say, the great teacher. The enticement of wantonness, the lure of the exotic; what resonates in our heart is the unknown. The same thing that makes them attractive is what makes them dangerous; we cannot know what will happen, so we either avoid them (which is safe, though boring) or we pursue them (which is thrilling, if hazardous).

Why is that so few of us spend those precious extra seconds to flip through the card catalog of our memory and think about *other* people who faced those choices, and then forecast the results in terms of ourselves? You know; vicariously? Experience I can glean from looking at the choices someone else made is just as educational as the experience I can get by trying the same experiment. Some experiments yield consequences, that are just so . . .

Permanent.

Yes, sometimes it’s boring to live a regular predictable life instead of one of unbridled freedom and chaos. Do free, unbridled, chaotic people bounce grandchildren on their knees? Perhaps, some of them survive, that’s just statistics; there will always be someone who survives the stupidest of chances. So that's the thing I guess. All of us have an economist that lives in our hearts that weighs the possibility of catastrophe before every choice.

Be sure you haven't gagged yours in the pursuit of variety.