Took the scooter out for my first solo spin today. It’s been parked at work since I bought it—I was planning to practice on it last weekend, but the first big storm of the winter pre-empted my plans. Plus I had to get the all-important helmet. But it’s registered now, I have the helmet, and it looked like rain, so I hustled over to the office to try beating the storm.
The big practice item for the day was starting it up and getting into first gear without stalling; my 1/2 hour of practice before buying got stuck on that point time and again, and really, everything is pretty moot until you get that part down. Surprisingly, I did it on the first try, and was able to scoot around at low speed through a few turns before I hit a stop sign and came to a lurching halt. After a frustrating few minutes of being a bit overeager on the clutch, I finally got it going again, and after that it was pretty smooth sailing—I did a bunch of laps around the lot, and finally got up enough nerve to take it out onto the street.
One thing I should have remembered from bicycing— without the protection of a metal shell around you, you really feel the mph, which for me is both a total rush and quite scary at first. I got the scooter up to about 30, but wanted to stay off of occupied streets and turned back into the parking lot when I hit the first light. I have a feeling I’m gonna be a grandma on this thing for a long while, and that’s OK. I’m more convinced than ever that taking the motorcycle training class is a good idea, although I got turning down pretty well. A good day, and if the weather holds I might try to bring her home tomorrow…
My inner 16-year-old is ecstatic. As is my outer 37-year-old. For the first time in my adult life, I owe no money. If the current job had done nothing else for me, this would have been plenty, although fortunately there are many other perks like cool people and interesting projects. So the lack of debt is freedom for my outer adult, long overdue and the result of a lot of hard work.
No debt means something else to the 16-year-old, though. Since that was the age (roughly) where I began to rack up debts of various kinds, first to my parents and then to over a dozen credit cards in the next 20 years, in some sense it’s like picking up where I left off. A little cash in the pocket, a lot of dreams about what I could do with it. And one of the biggest dreams my teenage self had was this:
Not this one exactly—the teenage me dreamed of being like the small group of cool Mods at my high school, who mostly rode Vespas, at least in my memories. We already shared a lot of the same tastes in music (mostly ska & new wave), and if not for my innate and overwhelming shyness I might have discussed that with them & made some friends.
However, high school cliques and shy kids don’t mix well, and so I found other less visible groups to be a part of until I could escape. The scooters stayed in my memory, though, filed away as a “maybe someday” for future reference. As I got closer to getting out of debt over the summer, fate in the form of several friends from work intervened and brought that memory back up to the surface. And so I decided that my scooter dreams were to be the fuel of my debt-free fire—I could buy the scooter once I was out of debt and able to afford it without having to use credit.
So now I find myself at 37, on the cusp of my 20-year high school reunion, the proud owner of a beautiful white steed—hereby christened “Rasagulla” for its Indian heritage, color, and sweetness. May it fuel as many memories in the coming 20 years as it has for the past 20.
