Ready to Ride X

I’ve got a picture I want to show you. I want to show it to you this way. It’s a picture of my grandfather, my father’s father. A man born in 1898. My grandfather stands among eighteen other men in the picture and seven horses in the winter in front of a raw, unpainted frame…

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Ready to Ride IX

You got no class. Sorry. You got no idea. Tough luck. You weren’t born soon enough. That’s the way it goes. Call me old enough to know better. Call me too old to get it up. Call me anything you like. I don’t have to call you anything at all. Because you got no style.…

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Ready to Ride VIII

I attended a concert by the Rolling Stones on July 11, 1966 in Houston, Texas at the Sam Houston Coliseum the day before my seventeenth birthday. I recall Mick Jagger strutting across the stage wearing a white blazer decorated all over with large blotches of caramel color and he couldn’t get no satisfaction. Neither could…

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Ready to Ride VII

I took a ride yesterday, the last good day to ride if you like temperatures in the seventies. A very windy day. I didn’t know how windy until I got out in the country. Then I knew. It blew me off my line, that invisible line you travel left of center near the opposing traffic…

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Ready to Ride VI

In 1964 my mother bought a clock in the city where we lived. A clock to stand in the hall, purchased with money when her mother died she received. Not a lot of money. Enough to buy the clock when I had only just begun to enter high school. The clock ticked in the hall.…

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Ready to Ride V

I think it is important to go home a winner. I think it is important to allow no dream to die, else it is no dream worth dreaming. If a dream dies, it is mortal and no dream should be made of such rotten stuff. We live in a world of change, but what makes…

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Ready to Ride IV

There’s something called the Zone. It’s a place runners talk about, mostly runners. They talk about entering the Zone when they’ve run a long way and their body wants to stop, but they keep on running and there’s a Wall, but they run through the Wall and they enter the Zone. It has something to…

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Ready to Ride III

This is a parable. It’s a warning. It’s a piece of advice. It’s the truth. I went to a store today that specializes in electronics. They sell anything related to everything you can plug in or charge or turn on and off and all of those electronic devices are becoming more and more complicated and…

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Ready To Ride II

We lost Ole day before yesterday. Tuesday. One year to the week after we brought him home. A Bernese Mountain Dog rescued from a derelict property in the presence of adults who didn’t feed him because, “He wasn’t our dog.” He weighed forty-six pounds at one year of age. He should have weighed eighty. When…

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Ready To Ride

My father said to me, “Stay off motorcycles. Stay out of bars.” After I bought my motorcycle I said to my father, “One out of two ain’t bad.” I rode my motorcycle Thursday. I had not ridden for over a year. I had not taken it out for that length of time and had my…

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