My father and me watching a race at Rabbit Run Motorcross Park, Plano, Texas, in 1977.
A Boy
It’s 1977 and I’m 9 years old. The intense North Texas sun shines hard on my dirty, sweat-coated face as I ride through a steep berm at Rabbit Run Motocross Park. My coveted yellow and black Yamaha YZ 80 spits out dark, loamy dirt from its back tire as I straighten my handlebars and meet a long straightaway heading toward a series of tall jumps.
My faithful dad stands just outside the track behind the bright orange plastic fencing and strings of multicolored pennant flags that mark its boundaries. A frequent presence when I ride, he gives me two thumbs up as I pull back hard on the throttle, preparing to soar over those jumps and make another lap around the track.
I can ride like this for hours and I often do.
A Man
Forty-three years later, I head north on Congress Avenue in Austin with the Texas Capitol lying straight ahead. It’s early on a Saturday morning with hardly a car on the road, and now I’m riding a different motorcycle, a beautiful red Suzuki I have just purchased, and I feel like I did at 9 years old.
It’s been more than a decade since I got the motorcycle bug again. After years of lobbying my wife Tracey, and after taking a motorcycle safety course, buying a top-rated helmet, and agreeing to a list of rules as long as my arm, she has finally given me her consent. It’s far from an enthusiastic endorsement mind you, but it’s heartfelt, kind, generous, and the green light I have sought for years.
We both know the reasons I should not be riding a motorcycle. At the same time, we know that everyone needs to attend to certain things if they are to live, assessing risks and rewards that come with them, yes, but never diminishing what offers joy, freedom, and a sense of being fully alive.
There’s also something about having a progressive and incurable illness that gets your attention; that confronts you with an acute awareness of life’s ticking clock, of how little you are guaranteed while on this clock, and of what’s at stake when you opt to live as more of a spectator of what you love than a participant in it.
A Decision
Admittedly, I did not tell many people I bought a motorcycle. I feared their judgment; or that they would assume I had lost my mind. A few of those I told or who saw me riding around our neighborhood likely wondered if I was having the proverbial mid-life crisis. You know, an aha moment or series of moments that some folks in middle age experience when they realize they do not have unlimited time on this earth.
But these critical turning points, these crises, can motivate us, whether constructively or otherwise, to stake new claims on life, to experience certain things while we still can, and to embrace a line in a well-known movie, “We either get busy living or get busy dying.”[1]
To whatever extent I have stood in judgment of others and their personal choices—such as a fifty-something buying a motorcycle or a convertible sports car—I do so less often since learning I have Parkinson’s disease.
This brings me to share a decision I made a few weeks after buying the motorcycle. I decided to sell it to someone who feels as delighted to get it as I did. There are several reasons for my decision and I won’t rehearse them all. Simply put, I’m a 52-year-old man living with Parkinson’s disease, and while I can still ride just fine, I cannot ride at Rabbit Run.
A Gift
Willa Cather wrote, “Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again” [2]. I had experiences and created memories on that red Suzuki that will stay with me, just like the memories of joy and freedom—of love—I had as a young boy riding with my dad. Parkinson’s will never touch any of this.
Never.
Of course, some of the more meaningful and rewarding experiences in life come with risk. Whether riding a motorcycle, starting a new job, entering into a romantic relationship, or giving birth to a child, no meaningful life can be risk-free. No abundant life remains entirely safe.
Still, we all have to make choices about what risks we can tolerate. We choose the risks worth taking, those we do best to forego, and those we can leave to others and then live vicariously through them. It can take some time to make these kinds of choices. Sometimes, it can take 43 years or longer.
That Tracey consented to my getting the Suzuki is something that only deepens my love for her. As she has for over 30 years, she looked into my eyes and understood.
I doubt I’ll ever need to ask for her consent to ride again, but I’m keeping my helmet, just in case.
I’m also lobbying her for a convertible.
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[1] See The Shawshank Redemption.
[2] Willa Cather, My Ántonia, Book V, Section 1 (CreateSpace, 2018), 216.
Photo by Tracey Cole. After I sent her a video clip of a race my dad and I attended at Rabbit Run Motorcross Park in 1977, which I found on YouTube, she noticed a young boy and a man watching the action. When she stopped the video and zoomed in, she saw it was my dad and me.
Allan Cole is a professor in The Steve Hicks School of Social Work at The University of Texas at Austin and, by courtesy, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Dell Medical School. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2016, at the age of 48, he serves on the Board of Directors at Power for Parkinson’s, a non-profit organization that provides free exercise, dance, and singing classes for people living with Parkinson’s disease in Central Texas, and globally via instructional videos. He also serves as a Community Advocate for ParkinsonsDisease.net, and as a regular guest contributor to the Michael J. Fox Foundation’s Team Fox Blog, writing columns about living well with Parkinson’s. He is the author or editor of 12 books on a range of topics related to bereavement, anxiety, and spirituality. His latest books, Counseling Persons with Parkinson’s Disease (Oxford University Press) and Discerning the Way: Lessons from Parkinson’s Disease (Cascade), will be published in 2021. Follow him on Twitter @PDWise.
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